Language Log

President Obama's speech at Cairo University today included this important passage:

[F]reedom in America is indivisible from the freedom to practice one's religion. That is why there is a mosque in every state of our union, and over 1,200 mosques within our borders. That is why the U.S. government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab, and to punish those who would deny it.

So let there be no doubt: Islam is a part of America.

Unfortunately, what he actually said (about 11 minutes into the speech) was a bit different.

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I'd be interested to know if any clever net-wranglers who read Language Log could provide a link (I haven't found one) to non-overdubbed audio of the official broadcast announcement of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's recent nuclear test. The BBC played a little bit of it, and it was truly astonishing. High pitched, over-the-top emotional, and bombastic in a kind of frantic way that sounded utterly ludicrous. Not just like a squeaky and histrionic Korean voice bragging in a deranged kind of way, but like a Saturday Night Live sketch depicting a squeaky and histrionic Korean voice bragging in a deranged kind of way. It was creepy, but I'd sort of love to hear it again. No I wouldn't… Perhaps I would. I don't know. Give the link in the comments area if you can find one, and I'll think about whether it's too creepy to listen to.

In the coverage of the civil war in Sri Lanka, I haven't seen much discussion of its linguistic aspects. In particular, the Sinhala Only Act of 1956 was a key event, whose causes and consequences are worth considering.

Let's try a little (thought) experiment in verbal short-term memory. First, find a friend. Then, find a reasonably complex sentence about 45 words long, expressing a cogent and interesting point about an important issue — say this one from a story in today's New York Times: "But the billions in new proposed American aid, officials acknowledge, could free other money for Pakistan’s nuclear infrastructure, at a time when Pakistani officials have expressed concern that their nuclear program is facing a budget crunch for the first time, worsened by the global economic downturn."

Now call your friend up on the phone, and have a discussion about the topic of the article. In the course of this conversation, slip in a verbatim performance of the selected sentence. Then ask your friend to write an essay on the topic of the discussion. (OK, this is a thought experiment, right?)

How likely is it that the selected sentence will find its way, word for word, into your friend's essay?

In spite of President Obama's stated opposition to the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy, the Army has fired another gay "linguist", Lieutenant Dan Choi, an openly gay infantry patrol leader fluent in Arabic. No doubt the resulting surge in morale in his unit will overcome the loss of its ability to communicate with the local population. :)

So proclaims the cover of Michel Brûlé's "Essai sociologique" Anglaid: Une langue irrémédiablement vouée à l’impérialisme et à l’ethnocentrisme ("English: A language irremediably devoted to imperialism and ethnocentrism"), in a photographed scrawl that reminds me of the shots in the movie A Beautiful Mind of John Nash's study walls during his descent into schizophrenia.

The English language press in China is swooning (here, here, and here) over the young (age 19) Panchen Lama's address in English to the Second World Buddhist Forum on March 27, 2009. The Forum opened in the east China city of Wuxi in Jiangsu Province and closed five days later after the participants were flown to Taipei on four direct charter flights.

You can hear the Panchen Lama's speech for yourself here.

Here's what I think you should do regarding your desire to immigrate to Scotland so you can study linguistics and English language at the University of Edinbu… oops. I nearly put a foot wrong there. According to a brochure I just received from my daytime employer:

Staff should not give immigration advice to students. To do so represents a high risk and is a criminal offence.

A criminal offence? A conversation in which I supply you with some advice about UK immigration matters could end up with me facing criminal charges? Even for me, well versed in the many ways the UK government is permitted to restrict freedom of speech (look for the phrase "who cannot be named for legal reasons" in UK newspapers, for another example), it is hard to get fully attuned to the necessity to button one's lip. Sorry. No advice from me.

Politicians who have to assert some proposition P often take advantage of the opportunity to flap their mouths a bit more by asserting not just that P but also that they have consistently maintained that P in the past. It functions as a kind of gratuitous self-affirmation regarding consistency over time, and a pre-emptive defense to any possible charge of flip-flopping. The habit has spawned what appears to me to be an entirely new construction. The spokesman for UK prime minister Gordon Brown said yesterday (in a defensive response to something the governor of the Bank of England had said about Britain being unable to afford another round of debt-fueled stimulus to the economy): "We have been clear that we will do whatever it takes to see us through the global downturn." It seems to me that this is almost entirely a feature of minister-speak, and to a lesser extent corporate-speak ("Certainly Microsoft is a well-respected and successful company and we have been clear that we are fully prepared to do a deal with them", said a Yahoo! release recently). Lots of people think (ever since Orwell's "Politics and the English language") they are highly sensitive to new developments of government and business jargon. Yet I don't believe that "We have been clear that P" has been discussed in language forums before (I could be wrong). Despite all the grumbling about newfangled clichés (often not so newfangled), when a new syntactic construction limited to organizational jargon comes along, apparently people don't spot it.

Edward Liddy chose, bizarrely, to start the third paragraph of his Op-Ed piece in today's WaPo ("Our Mission at AIG: Repairs, and Repayment") with a classical allusion:

Mistakes were made at AIG, and on a scale that few could have imagined possible. The most egregious of those began in 1987, when the company strayed from its core insurance competencies to launch a credit-default-swaps portfolio, which eventually became subject to massive collateral calls that created a liquidity crisis for AIG. Its missteps have exacted a high price, not only for the company and its employees but for the American taxpayer, the federal government's finances and the global economy. These missteps brought AIG to the brink of collapse and to the government for help.

When I was interviewed for Spiegel Online earlier this week about the dastardly Cupertino effect, I was asked if I thought spellchecker-enabled miscorrections would eventually vanish as spellchecking technology becomes more accurate in predicting potential errors. I said I thought Cupertinos would continue to be with us in one form or another, in large part because of the proper name problem: a reasonably restrictive spellchecker dictionary can never encompass all the proper names that might appear in a given text, particularly unusual foreign names. Consider the old Obama/Osama tangle: after 9/11, Osama was added to Microsoft's spellchecker dictionary, but at the time no one could have predicted that Obama would also be an important name to include. Thus they had to scramble to add Obama when he rose to prominence and spellcheckers were giving Osama as the first suggestion.

Now, as if on cue, the District of Columbia Republican Committee kindly illustrates my point in a new press release.

A couple of days ago, Gail Collins asked ("Just Steele Yourselves", NYT 3/6/2009):

So is Steele the de facto leader of the Republican Party? Anybody who announces “I’m the de facto leader” probably isn’t.

Then who is? Rush Limbaugh? He sure is enjoying the attention. “The administration is enabling me,” he told Politico. Honestly, “enabling” is not the perfect choice of words for a guy with Rush’s background.

Ms. Collins' source for the Rush Limbaugh quote is Jonathan Martin, "Rush Job: Inside Dems' Limbaugh Plan", 3/4/2009:

Limbaugh is embracing the line of attack, suggesting a certain symbiosis between him and his political adversaries.

"The administration is enabling me,” he wrote in an e-mail to POLITICO. “They are expanding my profile, expanding my audience and expanding my influence.

I agree that enabling is an odd word for El Rushbo to choose, given his well-publicized struggles with drug addiction. The new negative sense of enable and its derivatives has so nearly overwhelmed the older positive or neutral meanings, at least in the construction he used,  that Ms. Collins doesn't even need to remind her readers about it.

It's been a while since we've seen our old friend, the crisis-(danger)-opportunity trope. In its canonical form, the trope asserts that the Chinese character for "crisis" is a combination of the characters for "danger" and "opportunity." A simpler variation removes the "danger," suggesting that the Chinese character (or word) for "crisis" is the same as that for "opportunity" (sometimes stated as a proverbial equivalence: "The Chinese say that crisis is opportunity" or "…in crisis lies opportunity").

With or without the "danger" element, the trope is a favored rhetorical gesture by politicians and other public figures looking to pivot from pessimism to optimism. The roster of prominent American trope-users includes John Foster Dulles, John F. Kennedy, Condoleezza Rice, and Al Gore (a repeat offender). Now President Obama joins the list, but thankfully he omits the largely bogus framing device about Chinese hanzi (along with the "danger").