Language Log

A nice example of the way singular they works was overlooked (like health care, the economy, and everything else in the past week of "racial politics") during the brouhaha over President Obama's press conference remarks about the arrest in Cambridge, Massachusetts of Professor Henry Louis Gates. Obama said:

. . . the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.

Why would he use they and their, when the antecedent, somebody, is syntactically singular, and we actually know that the somebody he is talking about in this case was Professor Henry Louis Gates, who is male? Why did he not say proof that he was in his own home?

Mae Sander has passed on this fascinating story from the joint website of the Ghana Institute of Architects and the Architects Registration Council of Ghana. According to the story (attributed to Prof. Ablade Glover of the College of Arts of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi), every Ghanaian chief

has a linguist. He goes on errands to convey his master's ideas, or appears in public with him.

Boko Haram has been in the news recently, e.g. Joe Boyle, "Nigeria's 'Taliban' enigma", BBC News, 7/28/2009:

They have launched co-ordinated attacks across northern Nigeria, threatening to overthrow the government and impose strict Islamic law – but who exactly are the Nigerian Taliban?

Since the group emerged in 2004 they have become known as "Taliban", although they appear to have no links to the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Some analysts believe they took inspiration from the radical Afghans, others say the name is more a term of ridicule used by people in Maiduguri, the area where they were founded.

The group's other name, Boko Haram, means "Western education is a sin" and is another title used by local people to refer to the group.

Isa Sanusi, from the BBC's Hausa service, says the group has no specific name for itself, just many names attributed to it by local people.

If their name is uncertain, however, their mission appears clear enough: to overthrow the Nigerian state, impose an extreme interpretation of Islamic law and abolish what they term "Western-style education".

In "Xinhua English and Zhonglish," I discussed the phenomenon of a peculiar style of English that has developed in China.  Since it is not outrageously incorrect in terms of grammar or grossly unidiomatic, this type of English cannot be labeled Chinglish.  On the other hand, this particular style of English, which we may call Xinhua English or New China News English, is distinctive enough to be recognizable as an emerging dialect.

The latest instance (like the previous one) was brought to my attention by Victor Steinbok, who keeps a keen eye out for pertinent examples.  It is in today's headline from China View, an organ of Xinhuanet:  "China lodges solemn representation over Japan's permission for Rebiya Kadeer's visit."

According to Peter Bergen, "Winning the good war", Washington Monthly, July/August 2009:

A corollary to the argument that Afghanistan is unconquerable is the argument that it is ungovernable—that the country has never been a functioning nation-state, and that its people, mired in a culture of violence not amenable to Western fixes, have no interest in helping to build a more open and peaceful society. Certainly endemic low-level warfare is embedded in Pashtun society—the words for cousin and enemy in Pashtu, for instance, are the same. [emphasis added]

Ali Soleimani, who sent this link to me, asked:

Naturally, I was somewhat suspicious of the validity of this; and a little looking in online Pashto-English dictionaries indeed failed to turn up any evidence for it. This seems to be fairly comprehensive dictionary, and it contains 8 words whose definitions include "enemy", none of which give "cousin" or anything similar as a meaning. The most common word for 'enemy' (judged by its presence in other dictionaries) seems to be duś̱ẖman (دښمن), glossed as "adversary, enemy, foe." This dictionary does appear to be from the 19th-century, so perhaps the usage has changed since then.

Do you know if the statement is true? And if it isn't, do you have any idea where the author may have gotten the idea?

In today's Iran Updates at niacINsight:

According to Tabnak, Mohsen Namjoo an Iranian artist and folk singer was sentenced to 5 years in prison for singing lyrics of the Koran in a modern popular style of Music.

Mohsen Namjoo is very popular in Iran and has made a few concerts around the world including in North American cities.

This is further evidence of the government’s ongoing effort to clamp down on artists and musicians.

Last month, it was Barack Obama whose (allegedly) imperial ego was said to be signaled by (fictitious) overuse of first-person singular pronouns. (Follow the link for discussion of columns on the topic by Terence Jeffrey, George F. Will, Stanley Fish, and Mary Kate Cary.) A few days ago, Peggy Noonan's devastating attack on Sarah Palin ("A Farewell to Harms", WSJ, 7/11/2009) presented a similar argument:

She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.

In two recent posts, Mark Liberman has investigated the religious echoes in expressions from Sarah Palin: "I know that I know that I know" and "If I die, I die." In my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, I take up yet another religiously evocative Palinism: "Only dead fish go with the flow." Turns out that variations of this adage have been circulating in Christian circles for nearly two centuries.

Subtle dog whistle or a typical comment from someone who brags about being covered in fish slime? You be the judge!

Given the importance of religion in Sarah Palin's life, it's not surprising that her ways of talking are full of echoes or allusions that others may not understand or even notice. Earlier today I discussed her phrase "I know that I know that I know this is the right thing for Alaska".  The same interview contained a phrase that may well allude to the book of Esther.

A few days ago, I was puzzled by the triple know in one of Gov. Mark Sanford's interviews:

Everybody's got their own value system, but to me, even if it's a place that I could never go, if I wanted to know that I knew that I knew, if that's more important to me than running for president, that's my prerogative as a human being.

I wondered whether he might be exhibiting an unexpected run of multiple-target speech errors (compare "the biggest self of self is self" from his earlier press conference). But a commenter, William Ockham, set me straight:

"To know that you know that you know" is a stock phrase in fundamentalist evangelical speech that's used to make an experiential claim about a supernatural reality. "To know" something is to have learned about it. "To know that you know" is to be certain of something you've learned. "To know that you know that you know" is to be certain of something because you learned it by experiencing it directly.

I think Sanford is saying that he went to Argentina because he believed that he had discovered true love and wanted to be certain of that, even if it went against his own moral code.

Today's news brings another example of the same construction, this time from Sarah Palin.

Here at Language Log Plaza, we've been following the linguistic angles of the Gov. Mark Sanford story ever since he mysteriously went "out of pocket." (See: "Out of pocket," "The biggest self of self is indeed self," "Doing stupid," and "If I wanted to know that I knew that I knew.") But the lasting contribution of the Sanford saga to the English language may very well be the sudden spawning of a political euphemism: "hiking the Appalachian trail."

Mark Peters is the resident euphemism expert on the Visual Thesaurus website, rounding up circumlocutions old and new for his monthly column, Evasive Maneuvers. His latest column, "Hiking the Euphemistic Trail," is a Sanford special.

Gov. Mark Sanford continues to be a source of statements that are linguistically interesting on a variety of levels.  In the same AP interview where he confessed to having "done stupid",  he explained his value system in terms that raise several significant philosophical issues: "Everybody's got their own value system, but to me, even if it's a place that I could never go, if I wanted to know that I knew that I knew, if that's more important to me than running for president, that's my prerogative as a human being."

I'll leave to others such theological questions as whether the idea that "everybody's got their own value system" is consistent with whatever brand of Christianity the governor subscribes to. My interest here is what he meant by saying that he trashed his political career because "I wanted to know that I knew that I knew".

It's not quite as ineffably koan-like as "The biggest self of self is self," but Gov. Mark Sanford delivered another parsing puzzler in his latest comments to the Associated Press, in which he admits to additional liaisons with his Argentinian mistress and further unspecified "line-crossing" with other women:

What I would say is that I've never had sex with another woman. Have I done stupid? I have.