Language Log

George F. Will, "An Olympic Ego Trip", WaPo, 10/6/2009:

In the Niagara of words spoken and written about the Obamas' trip to Copenhagen, too few have been devoted to the words they spoke there. Their separate speeches to the International Olympic Committee were so dreadful, and in such a characteristic way, that they might be symptomatic of something that has serious implications for American governance.

Both Obamas gave heartfelt speeches about . . . themselves. Although the working of the committee's mind is murky, it could reasonably have rejected Chicago's bid for the 2016 Games on aesthetic grounds — unless narcissism has suddenly become an Olympic sport.

In the 41 sentences of her remarks, Michelle Obama used some form of the personal pronouns "I" or "me" 44 times. Her husband was, comparatively, a shrinking violet, using those pronouns only 26 times in 48 sentences. Still, 70 times in 89 sentences conveyed the message that somehow their fascinating selves were what made, or should have made, Chicago's case compelling.

The Reverend Angela Tilby ended her scandalously unresearched little "Thought for the Day" talk of 1 October 2009 (part of which I have already discussed in this recent post) by suggesting that during the British political party conference season (i.e., right about now) we should try taking a blue pencil and editing out all the adjectives from the political speeches so that we could "see what is really being said about people, places, things, deeds and actions". She holds to the ancient nonsense about how nouns tell us the people, places, and things while verbs give us the deeds and actions but adjectives give us nothing but qualifications and hot air and spin — they contribute no content. And she is clearly implying that she (cynically) expects political speeches to be full of adjectives. But as before, she hasn't done any checking at all, she has just spouted her conjectures straight into the microphone. So let's try a second breakfast experiment, shall we?

Following up on Mark's post about William Safire's latest On Language column, "Bending the curve," I wanted to share some of the citational history of this particular idiom, as I've been able to piece it together. The brief story can be found in my Aug. 21 Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, "The Lexicon of the Health Care Debate." What follows is the long story.

To a lot of people, Joe Wilson deserves credit not just for speaking his mind, but for speaking theirs. "He blurted out what many other Republicans probably were thinking,"  one commentator put it, while Rush Limbaugh said: "I was shouting, "You're lying," throughout the speech at the television.  You're lying!  It's a lie!  Joe Wilson simply articulated what millions of Americans were saying." 

Well, not quite. However many Americans were moved to tax the President with dishonesty as they listend to the speech, it's a safe bet they expressed themselves the way Limbaugh did, in the present progressive — "You're lying." Whereas what Wilson said was "you lie," revisting a use of the simple present that parted ways with ordinary conversational English a couple of centuries ago. "You lie" — it's a sentence you expect to hear finished with "sirrah," and not the sort of thing that anyone says in a moment of spontaneous anger. (–"I really meant to put the money back." –"You lie!")

Neurocriminology is a hot topic. From Isabella Bannerman, recently published in the Six Chix series:

From Peter Nichols, "Body of Evidence: Neurocriminologist Probes the Biology of Crime", recently published in Penn Arts & Sciences magazine:

In the mid-19th century, Italian physician Cesare Lombroso was doing an autopsy on Giuseppe Villella, a notorious brigand who’d spent years in the prisons of Pavia. Peering into the dead criminal’s skull case, Lombroso thought it resembled the crania of “inferior animals,” particularly rodents. “At the sight of that skull,” he wrote, “I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal.”

In the context of concerns about declining civility in American political discourse, Victor Steinbok points to a post at Vukutu on Australian Political Language, which quotes from "Mungo MacCallum’s great book, How to be a Megalomaniac, … a list of the terms of abuse which [former prime minister Paul] Keating  had used against his opponents duing his time in politics":

“harlots, sleazebags, frauds, immoral cheats, blackguards, pigs, mugs, clowns, boxheads, criminal intellects, criminals, stupid crooks, corporate crooks, friends of tax cheats, brain-damaged, loopy crims, stupid foul-mouthed grub, piece of criminal garbage, dullards, stupid, mindless, crazy, alley cat, bunyip aristocracy, clot, fop, gigolo, hare-brained, hillbilly, malcontent, mealy-mouthed, ninny, rustbucket, scumbag, scum, sucker, thug, dimwits, dummies, a swill, a pig sty, Liberal muck, vile constituency, fools and incompetents, rip-off merchants, perfumed gigolos, gutless spiv, glib rubbish, tripe and drivel, constitutional vandals, stunned mullets, half-baked crim, insane stupidities, champion liar, ghouls of the National Party, barnyard bullies, piece of parliamentary filth.”

"MacCallum notes that this listing is only of terms which Keating used in Federal Parliament, which of course has rules of decorum not applying in the rougher world outside."

A couple of weeks ago, Yale University Press decided to remove the illustrations from Jytte Klausen's forthcoming book The Cartoons that Shook the World. (See "Yale Press Bans Images of Muhammad in New Book", NYT, 8/12/2009). Among the many condemnations of this decision that I've read, Christopher Hitchens' ("Yale Surrenders", Slate, 8/172009) is the only one that makes a lexicographical argument:

[YUP director John] Donatich is a friend of mine and was once my publisher, so I wrote to him and asked how, if someone blew up a bookshop for carrying professor Klausen's book, the blood would be on the publisher's hands rather than those of the bomber. His reply took the form of the official statement from the press's public affairs department. This informed me that Yale had consulted a range of experts before making its decision and that "[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence."

So here's another depressing thing: Neither the "experts in the intelligence, national security, law enforcement, and diplomatic fields, as well as leading scholars in Islamic studies and Middle East studies" who were allegedly consulted, nor the spokespeople for the press of one of our leading universities, understand the meaning of the plain and common and useful word instigate. If you instigate something, it means that you wish and intend it to happen. If it's a riot, then by instigating it, you have yourself fomented it. If it's a murder, then by instigating it, you have yourself colluded in it. There is no other usage given for the word in any dictionary, with the possible exception of the word provoke, which does have a passive connotation. After all, there are people who argue that women who won't wear the veil have "provoked" those who rape or disfigure them … and now Yale has adopted that "logic" as its own.

Sarah Lyall's piece "An Expat Goes for a Checkup" (front page of the NYT Week in Review, August 16) disusses American attacks on Britain's National Health Service (and affronted British responses, and her own experiences with the NHS), leading with the Investor's Business Daily invoking the physicist Stephen Hawking in an August 3 editorial opposing Barack Obama's health care proposals. As Geoff Pullum posted here last week, IBD (an American enterprise) barreled into the matter with the (utterly mistaken) assumption that Hawking is an American. The question Geoff asked was where IBD got this idea.

I was just looking for something in international mail regulations and stumbled on something curious. Among the items that it is prohibited to send to Brazil are: "Primary educational books not written in Portuguese". I have no desire to send any such textbooks to Brazil – in fact I'm not planning on sending anything to Brazil – I noticed this while looking for something else – but I'm curious as to the reason for this prohibition. It stands to reason that in a country whose primary language is Portuguese most primary textbooks will be in Portuguese, but I should think that there would be some schools in which some textbooks are not, such as international schools. And even if no schools use such textbooks, I can imagine foreign residents importing books in their own language for the use of their children, or teachers and educationists who want to examine textbooks from other countries. Against these legimitate uses for non-Portuguese textbooks, it is hard to imagine the threat posed by non-Portuguese textbooks. Do any of our readers know what this is about?

It is truly almost beyond belief that the Investor's Business Daily could say in an editorial (which after much ribald mockery on the blogs they have now altered):

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

About a week ago, Arthur Laffer said the following on CNN:

I mean, i- i- i- if you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles, and you think they're run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid, and health care, done by the government.

Over the past couple of months, there's been a surge of media interest in various politicians' pronoun use. For some of the Language Log coverage, with links to articles by George F. Will, Stanley Fish, and Peggy Noonan (among others), see "Fact-checking George F. Will" (6/7/2009);  "Obama's Imperial 'I': spreading the meme" (6/8/2009); "Inaugural pronouns" (6/8/2009); "Another pack member heard from" (6/9/2009); "I again" (7/13/2009); "'I' is a camera" (7/18/2009).

In a comment on one of those posts, Karl Hagen asked:

Other than gut instinct, what's the evidence for assuming that greater use of first-person pronouns actually indicates excessive ego involvement? The absolute rate of first-person pronouns will obviously vary a lot depending on the context, but even controlling for context, is it really the case that those who say I more often are really more ego-involved?

I responded:

The best person to comment on this is Jamie Pennebaker. Pending his contribution, I'll quote relevant observations from a summary page on his web site …

Prof. Pennebaker has graciously contributed a guest post on the meaning of "I", which follows.

The National Taxpayers Union has been doing a little content analysis of the House Democrats' Health Care bill, noting the statistical predominance of words like require, limit, enforce, must, obligation, and restrict, and the scarcity of words like choice, options, and freedom. "House Democrats' Health Plan Contains Words of Coercion — not Choice — Text Analysis Shows," the headline on their news release says, as they conclude ominously:

if the language of the "America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009" is a guide to its true intent then the bill is really about empowering bureaucracy and limiting freedom, competition, and the marketplace.

Leaving the bill's content aside, the linguistic assumptions here seem a little confused. As vexing as it can be to have laws telling you what you're obliged or required to do, it's probably better than living someplace where the laws tell you what you're permitted or free to do. If we have to have laws, I'd rather have them peppered with must than with may.

[Added 8/7: Nancy Scola and Micah Sifry make a similar point at TechPresident.]