Language Log

Back in 2005, when George Lakoff's ideas about "framing" in political discourse were a hot media topic, the common journalistic mistake was to see the issue in terms of words rather than concepts.  Now the whole issue seems to have fallen out of fashion — at least, an interesting study, published about a month ago in Psychological Science and featured in the Random Samples section of Science Magazine, hasn't (as far as i can tell) generated a single MSM news story or even blog post.

A while back there was a to-do at the Miss USA Pageant when one of the judges, someone named Perez Hilton (at first I thought they meant Paris Hilton, but he seems to be distinct) asked candidate Carrie Prejean:

Vermont recently became the fourth state to legalize same-sex marriage. Do you think every state should follow suit? Why or why not?

and she responded:

Well I think it's great that Americans are able to choose one way or the other. We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. You know what, in my country, in my family, I do believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman, no offense to anybody out there. But that's how I was raised and I believe that it should be between a man and a woman.

They're getting to be routine, Mark's virtuoso skewerings of those who Google widely but not well — in the post below, taking on James Delingpole's effort to demonstrate that the Climategate story is undercovered by the MSM by showing that the number of Google hits for the phrase is disproportionate to the news stories about it. If I have one reservation — which doesn't affect his conclusions — it's that Mark lets Google off too lightly when he says that its hit-count algorithm "might over-estimate the total number of pages for a term that has increased very rapidly in the recent past," and goes on to allow that "if we take the counts at face value, then apparently there are a lot of people generating a lot of pages about climategate." Might overestimate? Too kind. When Google reports hit count estimates over a few hundred, the results should never be taken at face value, or any value at all — they're not only too inaccurate for serious research, but demonstrably flaky.

James Delingpole, "Climategate goes uber-viral, Gore flees leaving evil henchmen to defend crumbling citadel", The Telegraph, 12/4/2009:

Climategate is now huge. Way, way bigger than the Mainstream Media (MSM) is admitting it is – as Richard North demonstrates in this fascinating analysis. Using what he calls a Tiger Woods Index (TWI), he compares the amount of interest being shown by internet users (as shown by the number of general web pages on Google) and compares it with the number of news reports recorded. The ratio indicates what people are really interested in, as opposed to what the MSM thinks they ought to be interested in.

In a "Fresh Air" piece (audio, text) that aired today, I reprised a couple of the cases of quantitative quackery that Language Loggers have taken on, where someone counts up the words in a text to draw some utterly unjustified conclusions about its content or author. I mention the efforts to distill the essence of the Democrats' health care bills from the frequency of selected words, which I took up in a post a couple of months ago (it drew a number of useful comments thatI borrowed liberally from in the "Fresh Air" piece).

These enumerations have become more fevered on all sides as the bills make their interminable way  through Congress: Only seven instances of women! More than 3300 occurrences of shall, each a mandate that chips away at our freedom! On that last point, I note that, page-for-page, shall is more frequent in the Constitution than in the House healthcare bill, and conclude: "Critics of the bill are still free to insist that it opens a new fast lane on the road to serfdom. But that isn't something you can prove just by counting helping verbs."

Then there are the ubiquitous tallies of first-person pronouns aimed at demonstrating the egotism or arrogance of public figures.

Via The Swamp, the Chicago Tribune's political blog, comes news of an awesome (if spiteful) bit of gubernatorial wordplay from the office of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:

Today I got mail from the Republican National Committee — a survey they want me to fill out and (of course) an attached contribution form.   I don't know why they sent it to me, because in spite of their urging me "and other grassroots Republicans" to respond to their survey, I am not a registered Republican.   Maybe it's because my neighborhood is mostly Republican, though our nearest neighbors are bigwigs in the local Libertarian party.  In any case, many of the survey questions contain presuppositions that make them hard to answer.  They don't ask me if I've stopped beating my wife, er, spouse, but they do want to know if (for instance) I "believe that Barack Obama's nominees for federal courts should be immediately and unquestionably approved for their lifetime appointments by the U.S. Senate".

Paul Krugman, "The Banks Are Not Alright", NYT, 10/18/2009:

Mr. Summers still insists that the administration did the right thing: more government provision of capital, he says, would not “have been an availing strategy for solving problems.”

Use of "availing" in this way struck me as a new linguistic strategy.  But the OED gives availing as a participial adjective meaning "Advantageous, profitable; of beneficial efficiency", with glosses back to the 15th century:

c1420 Pallad. on Husb. I. 562 To faat hem is avayling and plesaunte. 1850 MRS. BROWNING Substitution Poems I. 327 Speak Thou, availing Christ! 1862 RUSKIN Unto this Last 118 A truly valuable or availing thing is that which leads to life with its whole strength.

In response to my recent posts "The United States as a subject" and "When did the Supreme Court make us an 'is'?", Rich Rostrom sent the following essay, reflecting some research he did a few years ago.

Stephen Colbert on Olympia Snowe (Colbert Report, Oct. 14):

We are now one step closer to a nightmare future where everyone has health insurance. And I will tell you who I blame: Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, the only Republican who voted in favor of the bill. And folks, I am angrier than an Eskimo… because I have 300 words for Snowe, and I can't say one of them on TV.

(Hat tip: Greg Howard.) The title for this post is lifted from the Twitter feed of Michael Covarrubias (aka Wishydig):

Susan Collins, R-Maine has hinted at a 'yes' vote. and only linguabloggers have "snowe-clone" in their repertoire of bad puns.

Counting languages isn't an easy task; in particular, it's hard to say whether two varieties are related languages or dialects of a single language. Making these decisions on linguistic grounds is difficult enough, but political, cultural, and social considerations often intervene, to compound the difficulty. The latest Ethnologue (16th ed., 2009) advertises itself as "an encyclopedic reference work cataloging all of the world's 6,909 known living languages", but the introduction lays out the problems in identifying and counting languages and acknowledges that the methods used in reaching this very exact number are not the only possible ones and that these methods involve judgment calls at several points.

A couple of days ago, in "Fact-checking George F. Will, one more time", I noted that Will complained about the

…  egregious cliches sprinkled around by the tin-eared employees in the White House speechwriting shop. The president told the Olympic committee that: "At this defining moment," a moment "when the fate of each nation is inextricably linked to the fate of all nations" in "this ever-shrinking world," he aspires to "forge new partnerships with the nations and the peoples of the world."

While admitting that "I don't have a program ready to hand for measuring cliche-density, much less cliche egregiosity ", I nevertheless offered the opinion that "in speeches prepared for ceremonial occasions like this one, the cliche density of presidential rhetoric has been fairly constant for decades if not centuries".

I still don't have a metric for cliche-density, but we can learn something by exploring the site http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/ for certain fixed phrases.

In my recent post "The United States as a subject", I discussed the often-repeated story that the American Civil War turned "the United States are" into "the United States is", and observed that "no one seems ever to have checked, at least not very thoroughly". It's a good thing that I said "seems", since Minor Myers has gently pointed me to his article "Supreme Court Usage and the Making of an 'Is'", 11 Green Bag 2d 457, August 2008, in which he checks this very point, very carefully, in opinions of the United States Supreme Court from 1790 to 1919.

And the answer? In the case of U.S. Supreme Court opinions, we apparently became an 'is' somewhat gradually, between 1840 and 1910. And the effect of the Civil War (or at least its immediate aftermath) was apparently to retard the change, not to accelerate it.