Language Log

[This is a guest post by Steven Pinker of Harvard University. —GKP]

I agree with Geoff Nunberg that the nucular pronunciation is not the result of a phonetic process that applies across the board in these dialects. It's a lexical phenomenon, though one with a phonetic motivation, and I didn't distinguish the two in my Times Op-Ed piece. In this regard I think it's related to Febuary, jewlery, iurn, purty, and Kirsten (from Christine). I also agree that there is an analogical attraction to words like binoculars, particular, circular, vascular, and muscular, but it is one that may have prevailed because the weak perception of the order of the adjacent sonorants in nuclear failed to resist the tug.

But I don't agree with other aspects of the analysis.

Last night, I got back from England in time to be faced with a dilemma: the third presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain, starting at 9:00 p.m., conflicted with the fifth game of the National League championship series between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Los Angeles Dodgers, starting around 8:30.

Based on past performances, I expected the NLCS to be more exciting than the debate. And there's this nifty method for summarizing debates: for each participant P, rank the words that P uses more than 10 times according to the ratio of P's count to the opponent's count. And CNN publishes an instant debate transcript…

Still, I felt that I should pay at least some attention to what was going on at Hofstra University. So my solution involved a couple of radios, a TV with picture-in-picture, and several sites that were live-blogging one or the other event. In the end, the Phillies won the game 5-1, and will be going to the World Series. What about the debate?

This guy Bob Schieffer did a nice little webcast tonight with a couple of friends, and I think it was covered on tv too. Maybe you watched? Or read a transcript, even? Anyhow, Bob, he says:

… we must reduce our dependence on foreign oil. When Nixon said it, we imported from 17 to 34 percent of our foreign oil. Now, we're importing more than 60 percent.

And I'm like, yeah, I can accept that last claim. An understatement, if anything. But what I can't figure out is what he says about Nixon. Foreign oil is one of those things that's sort of like didgeridoos, communism, and extraterrestrials, at least in this respect: they come from somewhere else.

So where the hell did Tricky Dicky find between 66 and 83 percent of his nation's foreign oil if he didn't import it?

In my Word Routes column over on the Visual Thesaurus website, I recently took a look at a peculiar turn of phrase used by Barack Obama in the Oct. 7 presidential debate: "Now, Senator McCain suggests that somehow, you know, I'm green behind the ears…" My initial assessment was that Obama had created an idiom blend, combining the more established expression "wet behind the ears" with the metaphorical extension of green implying immaturity. But as it turns out, the story of "green behind the ears" has some unexpected intricacies, including a surprising parallel in German.

Will Pavia at the Times, discussing the recent Loebner Prize event ("Machine takes on man at mass Turing Test", 10/13/2008), explains how he figured out which of his two interlocutors was human:

The other correspondent was undoubtedly a robot. I asked it for its opinion on Sarah Palin, and it replied: ‘Sorry, don’t know her.’ No sentient being could possibly answer in this way.

That's harsh. A more difficult test of politico-linguistic currency would be commenting on John Cole's recent coinage "Peak Wingnut" (Balloon Juice, 10/13/2008):

As I look around the blogosphere, and view memeorandum, it occurred to me that we may have hit and passed Peak Wingnut. Don’t get me wrong, this election is still not over and by no means in the bag, but as I read things, the hey day of modern wingnuttia may have passed.

In addition to everything else that's gone wrong, the McCain campaign is suffering from out-of-control metaphors. According to Adam Nagourney and Elizabeth Bumiller, "Concern in G.O.P. After Rough Week for McCain", NYT, 10/11/2008:

“My sense of where things are: John McCain beat back what was a political climate that would have snuffed out any other candidate in the Republican Party,” said Nicolle Wallace, a senior adviser. “He’s beat back every hurdle that was ever placed in front of him.”

In response to my post "Inaugural Americans", Steven Bird wrote:

It's easy to do something like this with NLTK:

import nltk
inaugural = nltk.Text(nltk.corpus.inaugural.words())
inaugural.dispersion_plot(['America'])

This produces plots like:

Reports that the textbook The World: Social Studies asserts that: "Christianity was started by a young Palestinian named Jesus." have triggered considerable controversy. Some maintain that this is a gross inaccuracy reflecting the intrusion of anti-Semitism, to which others respond that it is correct and so unexceptionable. The former are correct: the description of Jesus as a Palestinian is both inaccurate and offensive.

In a comment on my post about relative word frequencies in the vice-presidential debate, Roo suggested that there's "a difference in mindset/strategy between conservative and liberal politicians", where conservatives tend to use "America" while liberals use "United States". While this was true in that debate, I'm not sure whether it's true in general. As a start towards addressing the question, I took a quick look at the frequency of words based on the morpheme America (e.g. America, American, Americans) in the repository of inaugural addresses at the American Presidency Project.

The results show an overall rising trend, but no clear conservative/liberal division (at least none that's clear to me):

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

Michael Erard, who wrote the book about speech errors ("Um"), discusses the latest slip of the tongue to make political news. We've previously commented on John McCain's substitution of Iraq for Iran, Barack Obama's substitution of president for vice-president, David Kurtz's substitution of Republican for Democratic, and Jo Ann Davidson's substitution of Sarah Pawlenty for Sarah Palin.

In a recent post on "Affective demonstratives", I quoted the curious codicil to the OED's entry on that:

"Also that one, used disparagingly of a woman."

and I wondered whether this disparaging demonstrative really always has a female referent. And sure enough, this evening's presidential debate provided a counterexample.

Eager as always to score high-school snark points, Maureen Dowd wrote today about Sarah Palin ("Sarah's Pompom Palaver", 10/5/2008):

Then she uttered yet another sentence that defies diagramming: “It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there.”

"Defies diagramming"? Sorry, that sentence may not embody the most cogent foreign-policy argument ever made, and it's so awkward that it might have come from a non-native speaker —  but it seems syntactically straightforward to me.

This is a follow-up to Mark's post earlier today on affective demonstratives, though I am going to move us even further than he did from Palin and towards the lexical/constructional pragmatics. The overall picture is this: this NOUN reliably signals that the speaker is in a heightened emotional state (or at least intends to convey that impression), whereas those NOUN sends quite a different signal. Our data are from upwards of 50,000 speakers.