Language Log

We've often commented on the foolishness of the US policy of discharging badly needed Arabic interpreters and other soldiers who reveal that they are gay. It looks like this won't be coming up again. President-elect Obama has now definitively stated that he will eliminate the current "don't ask, don't tell" policy. It won't happen immediately though as a change in legislation is required.

Eric Crafton, a city councilor in Nashville, is the proponent of a law prohibiting government officials from communicating in any language other than English (with some exceptions for health and safety). Currently, there are no requirements that any particular language be used, a situation which, Mr. Crafton contends, is subject to abuse. To make his point he introduced his resolution in Japanese, which he is reported to speak fluently as the result of time spent in Japan while serving in the Navy.

As a public figure, you're in trouble when the media are less interested in what you have to say than in how you say it. This is now the sad situation of Caroline Kennedy, whose filled pauses seem to be getting more press than any other aspect of her bid for Hillary Clinton's senate seat.

A sample of the stories: "How Many Times Can Caroline Kennedy Say 'You Know' in Under a Minute?", Gawker, 12/27/2008; "Say goodnight, Caroline: How JFK's daughter flubbed the audition to become the next Senator Kennedy", NY Daily News, 12/28/2008; "Caroline Kennedy roasted over lacklustre press debut" AFP, 12/30/2008; "Kennedy's 'you knows' become political fodder", AP, 12/31/2008.

One scarcely needs to comment at all sometimes. I am most grateful to Victor Steinbok for alerting Language Log to an article in the Daily Telegraph (the link will be given below) about how singing the old song "The Hokey Cokey" could be defined as a hate crime, at least in Scotland. You might like to reflect for a minute, before I give you the link, on how this song could conceivably stir up hatred against any racial, religious, ethnic, or cultural group. A sample of the lyrics (you can read the whole of the lyrics here):

You put your left arm in, your left arm out
In out, in out, you shake it all about
You do the Hokey Cokey and you turn around
That's what it's all about
Whoa-o the Hokey Cokey
Whoa-o the Hokey Cokey
Whoa-o the Hokey Cokey
Knees bent, arms stretched
Raa raa raa…

Back in October, Allan Brown wrote a piece in Times Online about the money being spent on promoting and broadcasting the basically moribund Scots Gaelic language. It seemed at first that he was making a reasonable critique: spending about $30,000,000 on a digital TV service for a language with no more than 50,000 speakers, all of them bilingual in English and most of them without digital TV, could be argued (though linguists aren't supposed to think this way) to be an enterprise of doubtful value. But just as I was getting interested, Brown blundered into linguistics and revealed his dumb side:

I say language but Gaelic isn't one, not really. Its vocabulary is tiny, with no form of saying yes or no and attuned to a distant, pre-technological world. It's essentially a kind of rural patois, a bonsai idiolect; a way of specifying concepts central to a particular, highly codified way of life.

Yecchhh. Everything about the layman's concept of a language that I rail against is there.

After a period of having her staff send answers in writing to written questions, Caroline Kennedy recently granted an interview to Nicholas Confessore and David M. Halbfinger of the New York Times. On 12/27/2008, the NYT published an 8,600-word transcript of the interview, along with a conventional summary presentation whose online version includes a sidebar with nine short audio clips.

Sheila at Snarker Gawker listened to the first audio clip, and asked "How Many Times Can Caroline Kennedy Say 'You Know' in Under a Minute?" Sheila's answer was 12, and she remonstrated that "We can't listen to two years of this! Caroline: every pause need not be filled with wordage, you know?"

But for me, the most interesting part of this story wasn't Caroline Kennedy's choice of pause fillers, but the New York Times' editorial policy with respect to audio clips from interviews.

Verb phrase ellipsis in English normally requires an overt linguistic antecedent of approximately the right morphological form. That is, I can't normally begin my conversation with "He did!", but this is perfectly normal after "Sam said he would win, and …". There are exceptions, of course (Geoff Pullum's Hankamer Was! is lively and informative on this topic). Obama's campaign slogans "Yes, we can" and "Together, we can" were prominent exceptions. Lacking antecedents themselves, they invited inferred antecedents or allowed Obama to fill in occasion-appropriate ones. The first time I noticed headline writers playing with the slogan was November 5, 2008:

Using Google News, I gathered a bunch more, based on can, can't, and do.

Charles Lewis wrote to draw my attention to an Op-Ed by Danielle Allen in the Washington Post ("Red-State Army?", 12/19/2008). Allen discusses the social effects of the change to a smaller and all-volunteer military in the U.S. over the past 35 years, from what used to be a larger force mainly made up of draftees. She argues that "the map of military service since 1973 aligns closely with electoral maps distinguishing red from blue states"; and she suggests that this is a bad thing, because

Military institutions across nations and throughout time have always been important creators of culture. They strive to develop unbreakable bonds of solidarity among their members based on shared values, experiences and outlooks.

Her conclusion is that there should be "a new structure for national service" — though she avoids the issue of whether it should be mandatory — in order to "weave a fabric of shared citizenship anew".

I agree with her general position about the value of military service in creating a shared culture. But she gives a prominent role to a linguistic argument that I found unconvincing.

Geoff Pullum argues that the bleeping of Rod Blagojevich shields him from a full public appreciation of his foul-mouthedness: "somehow you don't get the measure of Rod Blagofuckinjevich's coarseness and contempt for the public by merely learning that he regarded his gubernatorial privilege as valuable; 'a fuckin' valuable thing' gets across more of the flavor of the man." Quite true. On the other hand, Americans have gotten so used to reading between the bleeps that it's still possible to appreciate (and satirize) Blago's coarseness in censored mode. Nightly satirists like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have already taken their shots, and now Saturday Night Live plays on his bleepability. [We had a link to the video here, but it has been killed off by an NBC copyright claim.]

An article in The Economist's latest issue is a bit more revealing about Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich's corrupt private chats than the more prudish print and broadcast media have been so far.

"Fire those fuckers," he said of those who wrote critical editorials about him at the Chicago Tribune, and threatened to hurt the paper financially if it did not oblige. "If they don't perform, fuck 'em", he said of an effort to squeeze contributions from a state contractor. But the most stunning charge is that Mr Blagojevich, who can appoint a nominee to hold Mr Obama's seat in the Senate until the scheduled election is held in 2010, wanted to sell the seat to the highest bidder. (The governor called the seat "a fucking valuable thing, you don't just give it away for nothing" and is alleged to have sought to get a big job in return for it.) . . . The complaint also alleges that Mr Blagojevich knew whom Mr Obama wanted to see in the seat, apparently his close adviser, Valerie Jarrett, and was less than happy ("fuck them") that all he would get in return for giving her the seat would be "appreciation".

Americans don't think well of people who talk like this when they have important roles in public life. That means that a small additional offense by such individuals may go unnoticed: their hypocrisy in being elected on fair words and clean talk and then relaxing into a very different foul-mouthed persona once in the job. By censoring even mentions of the taboo vocabulary of such hypocrites, the mainstream press helps to protect them. Less of the evidence of what they're like gets out there.

On Dec. 1, ABC News published the "excerpted transcript of Charlie Gibson's interview with President George Bush and First Lady Laura Bush at Camp David", along with some video clips of parts of the interview. The "transcript" is here, and the video clip containing the passage discussed below is here.

Here's the audio of one linguistically fascinating Q&A, along with my transcription:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Gibson: Do you feel in any way responsible for what's happening?
Bush: You know, I'm in president during this period of time but I think
uh when the history of this period is written people will realize
a lot of the decisions
uh that were made on Wall Street
took place over
you know a- a decade or so, before I arrived in president, during I arrived in president.
I'm sorry it's happening of course, obviously
I don't like the idea of people
losing jobs or being worried about their 401Ks.
On the other hand, the American people got to know that-
that uh we will safeguard the system, I mean
we're in, and if we need to be in more, we will.

What I want to focus on here is the expression "in president", which occurs three times in this answer.

Today's Doonesbury celebrates Sarah Palin's way with function words and inflectional affixes:

Yesterday, LizardBreath at Unfogged made an excellent point in response to my recent post about Sarah Palin's (in)coherence ("I Think There's A Problem With the Methodology Here", 11/19/2008):

If even the clearest speakers' speech often looks incoherent when transcribed, then this argument establishes that no one can ever be validly criticized as an unusually incoherent speaker. And that can't possibly be right — some people do sound clear and logical when they talk, and other people sound error-ridden and confused.