Language Log

A rather extraordinary language story broke in the UK yesterday when a police officer was put on suspension for allegedly peppering his testimony at an inquest with phrases taken from song titles, as a prank. One of the fuller news stories is the one in the tabloid newspaper The Sun (read it here). The question is not, of course, about whether it would be professionally improper to play jokes on a coroner by finding excuses to insert song titles into sworn testimony at an inquest involving the shooting of a civilian by a police marksman; it would be grossly offensive. The question is how an offense of this sort could ever be proved given that song titles are, as everyone must surely know, so frequently taken from everyday phrases and clichés that are extremely frequent in everyone's speech.

In the recent case of Berghuis v. Thompkins [560 U.S.____(2010) (docket 08-1470)] the U.S. Supreme Court ruled five to four that persons being interviewed by the police are required to articulate their answers to the Miranda warning that they have the right to remain silent. The case originated when Van Chester Thompkins was being questioned about a shooting in which one person was killed. Instead of invoking his Miranda right to remain silent, Thompkins simply remained silent, which is what the warning seemed to be allowing him to do. In fact, he remained silent through two hours and forty-five minutes of questioning, at which point the detective asked him if he believed in God and prayed, to which Thompkins spoke for the first time, saying "yes." The detective then asked him, "Do you pray to God to forgive you for shooting the boy down?" Thompkins again answered "yes," but refused to produce a written statement.

I ought to be grateful to see any sort of sporadic twitching of anti-racism, since I despise racists so much, but as I have said before, I sometimes find it hard to summon up a great deal of enthusiasm for some UK victories over hate speech. Let me tell you about a story I meant to mention back at the end of June but didn't get around to. It seems to have almost completely slipped away from public notice in the six weeks. The aspect of it that is likely to astonish Americans acquainted with the First Amendment is that a black city councillor, speaking in a council meeting in Bristol, England, in remarks about a race-related issue before the council, was prosecuted for a criminal offense, and fined, because she (allegedly) used the word coconut. The minor point, of linguistic and philosophical rather than legal relevance, is that strictly she didn't use the word at all.

From the Fox TV forensic psychology police-procedural show Lie To Me (Male Investigator is talking to Female Investigator about a suicide note she has decided is fake):

Male Investigator: Let me ask you something: how can you tell if this thing is fake if it's been typed?

Female Investigator: Word choice, repetition, and the use of passive or active voice can tell you a lot about the person who wrote this.

Of course! Passive versus active voice. Why didn't I think of it. That should tell us what we need to know about who wrote the note.

According to Nicholas Keung, "All immigrants face mandatory language test", The Star, 7/20/2010:

Born and raised in New York, Dodi Robbins graduated from Harvard University and has been practising law for 13 years.

Her first language is English. Yet like all other skilled immigrants applying to settle in Canada, the American corporate lawyer must now take a language test to prove her English is good enough to settle here.

“I was outraged, insulted and floored,” said Robbins, who obtained her law degree at Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School in New York. A mother of two, she has been working in Toronto on a work permit for four years as compliance and regulations counsel for an international financial services company.

“I almost fell off the chair. I’ve been practising law here for years and I have to prove my proficiency in English?”

Last month Ottawa made its language proficiency test mandatory for all skilled immigrant applicants, including native English and French speakers. The so-called “ministerial instructions” stipulate officials are not to process applications without language test results, starting June 26.

Canada's House of Commons has passed bill C-232, which requires that justices of the Supreme Court of Canada understand both English and French without the assistance of an interpreter. This will become law unless vetoed by the Senate or denied royal assent by the Governor General (which is exceedingly unlikely). Amazingly, the bill is a private member's bill introduced by a member of the New Democratic Party, which holds only 36 of 308 seats.

Today the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) finally dropped its disgraceful libel suit against the science writer Simon Singh, because Singh had won a Supreme Court judgment that restored his right to use the most obviously fair defense: that what he said was fair comment by a journalist stating his opinions on a matter of public concern. See the details in this article in The Times or this article in The Independent. We should celebrate this victory; but no one should think that it means things are now all right regarding freedom of speech for journalists in England. Singh is quite likely to lose about $90,000 of his own money, as well as the 45 weeks of his time, that he spent preparing a defense against the BCA's shameful lawsuit. The English libel law is still a crock, and desperately needs reform. In fact Singh is not the only science writer or scientist facing a libel action right now: Peter Wilmshurst still faces a suit by a company whose heart device he said was not safe.

There's an old headline-parody that involves posing a disjunctive question between two functionally equivalent alternatives, and "X: Threat or Menace?" is the most familiar form of this joke. We've used it more than once here on Language Log, for example in Geoff Nunberg's post "'Still unpacked': Threat or Menace?", 5/17/2005.

The England and Wales Court of Appeals delivered its judgment this morning in Simon Singh's appeal of last year's libel verdict against him.  This all began on April 19, 2008, when Singh wrote an opinion piece in the Guardian containing these sentences:

The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.

The BCA sued for libel, and won an initial victory in May of 2009, when Sir David Eady, the presiding judge in the English High Court, decided that Singh's piece involved assertions of fact rather than opinion, and that the word bogus in effect meant "fraudulent" and not just "ineffective". This decision meant that in order to defend himself successfully, Singh would have to prove that the BCA was deliberately and knowingly dishonest in promoting treatments that it knew did not work.

Although the Guardian withdrew the article, Singh chose to appeal Eady's judgment, and attracted considerable support for his goal of keeping libel laws out of scientific debate.

According to Eric Schmidt, "A different kind of company name", The Official Google Blog 4/01/2010:

Early last month the mayor of Topeka, Kansas stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google. We’ve been wondering ever since how best to honor that moving gesture. Today we are pleased to announce that as of 1AM (Central Daylight Time) April 1st, Google has officially changed our name to Topeka.

Although recent Language Log posts about crash blossoms have focused primarily on newspaper headlines, this phenomenon is even more important in messages written to warn customers about immanent hazards, where the same readability problems exist, but with heightened significance. For example, this one recently appeared on a Montana gasoline pump dispensing unit.

STATIC ELECTRIC SPARK

EXPLOSION HAZARD

Master Sgt. Jeffrey Sarver has filed a lawsuit against the makers of the film The Hurt Locker, claiming that screenwriter Mark Boal based the film's central character on him after Boal was embedded in Sarver's bomb squad unit in Iraq. I can't speak to the overall merits of the case, but one claim rings particularly hollow. The Detroit News reports:

Sarver said the very title of the movie was a phrase he coined in Iraq, and that Boal asked its meaning after hearing him use it. Boal has since copyrighted the phrase, Fieger said.
Sarver explained today that the term is akin to Davy Jones Locker, where legend says drowned sailors are kept.
"It's just a horrible place you go when you mess up," Sarver said. "It's a mental state. A place that's full of pain and hurt."

Unfortunately for Sarver, (in the) hurt locker is military slang dating back to 1966, as a quick trip to Google News Archive readily shows. I give the full history of the expression in my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus. Check it out.

[Update: For more on the supposed "copyright" of the phrase, see Dave Wilton's post on Wordorigins.org.]

We've previously covered the British Chiropractic Association's libel suit against Simon Singh, and the successful effort by Nemesysco to force a critical article to be withdrawn from the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law. Both of these cases involved the peculiar situation of English libel law, which (in the opinion of many) makes it too easy for wealthy plaintiffs to bully authors and publishers into silence.

An interesting case now in process involves an even more straightforward threat to intellectual discourse, in that both the plaintiff and the defendent are academics, and the contested writing is a critical book review in an academic journal. And this time the court is in France, not England.