Language Log

You may recall that last week, Craig Shirley & Bill Pascoe took Jon Huntsman to task for being "the GOP’s Barack Obama" ("Two more pundits who don't count", 6/21/2011). Their only fact-checkable evidence for this proposition was the observation that

In Huntsman’s announcement today, his remarks were infused with possessive pronouns, just like Obama.

Their article makes it clear that when they write "possessive pronouns", they mean to evoke the widespread idea that President Obama "is inordinately fond of the first-person singular pronoun", as George F. Will put it back in June of 2009.   Now that Michele Bachmann has officially announced her candidacy, I thought I'd see how Jon Huntsman compares with the other announced Republican candidates on the self-referentiality dimension.

I just had a terrible idea that could probably make someone a modest fortune. I was inspired by Erin Gloria Ryan, "My Love Affair With 'Like'", Jezebel 6/26/2011:

I use the word "like" with embarrassing frequency. I've started paying attention to how other people talk as well, and it's amazing how many women who I know are very smart are similarly infected with like-itis.

Where does this come from? Why do we do this? […]

Since we know that saying "like" too much leads others to negatively judge our intelligence, maybe inserting "like" into a sentence is something that we do to purposefully make ourselves sound less intelligent and forceful and therefore less formidable than we actually are. We're sabotaging ourselves! […]

Maybe women of my generation have been taught, through positive social reinforcement, that we're supposed to pepper our speech with meaningless modifiers that make us sounds a little less sure of ourselves, a little less credible. No one likes a show off or a know-it-all. Better temper your smart-talk with assurance to whoever you're speaking that you're not, like, a threat or anything. Any girl who's been teased for middle school nerdery has likely developed a long standing aversion for the feeling of being excluded for being too smart or opinionated. This is the way that socially acceptable people talk. This is the way that pretty people talk. Women are taught that it's more important to be pretty and socially accepted than it is to be smart. Ergo, like.

A candidate for the Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding, in the form of a BBC News teaser:

A penguin chick that was hand-reared by zoo keepers in Devon who used a puppet to impersonate an adult dies.

Today's Dilbert:

Here's how not to place a temporal modifier. See if you readily understand this sentence (from the UK's Daily Mirror) on first reading:

[H]e callously instructed his lawyers to add to her family's pain by implying the 13-year-old ran away because she was unhappy at home during days of cross examination.

So this poor 13-year-old girl was undergoing day-long cross examinations in her home? That certainly would make a teenager inclined to run away.

Reader SL asks for intervention in an disagreement about whether newspapers should use "gonna" in quotations:

I got in an argument with a colleague, who used to be a journalist, even, about this. She said there is nothing wrong with transcribing what someone says accurately. My point is that this is a clear case of diglossia in English; everyone always says "gonna" but it should always be written as "going to". She disagreed, and I said, "Well, I'm going to write to Language Log about that." Actually, I said "I'm gonna", but I wouldn't write that.

Those who can read German may be interested in some recent work by Gerd Fritz, of the Zentrum für Medien und Interaktivität at the Justus-Liebig-Universitaet Giessen, on "Texttypen im Language Log" ("Text types in Language Log"). Prof. Fritz tells me that this is "a brief summary of a longer paper to be published shortly".

… and is careless with grammatical terminology. Thomas Lifson, "Obama's troop withdrawal speech: when politics trumps victory", 6/23/2011:

Notably absent from the speech was any mention of General Petraeus or any of his other military advisors. The reasonable inference is that his military advice counseled against the withdrawal. Notably present was the personal pronoun, which was used about 3 dozen times. Obama is now openly mocked as "President Me, Myself, and I."

I learned this morning (from Adam Nagourney and Ian Lovett, "Whitey Bulger is arrested in California", NYT 6/23/2011) that

James (Whitey) Bulger, a legendary Boston crime boss indicted in 19 murders and who is on the F.B.I.’s 10 Most Wanted list, was arrested by federal authorities Wednesday night in Santa Monica, ending an international manhunt that had gone on since Mr. Bulger disappeared nearly 16 years ago, the F.B.I. announced.

This made me think, not of crime and punishment, but of euphony and usefulness.

Or maybe it's a writing comprehension test. Anyhow, it's past the jump.

Sam Dillon, "U.S. Students Remain Poor at History, Tests Show", NYT 6/14/2011

American students are less proficient in their nation’s history than in any other subject, according to results of a nationwide test released on Tuesday, with most fourth graders unable to say why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure and few high school seniors able to identify China as the North Korean ally that fought American troops during the Korean War.

Over all, 20 percent of fourth graders, 17 percent of eighth graders and 12 percent of high school seniors demonstrated proficiency on the exam, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Federal officials said they were encouraged by a slight increase in eighth-grade scores since the last history test, in 2006. But even those gains offered little to celebrate because, for example, fewer than a third of eighth graders could answer even a “seemingly easy question” asking them to identify an important advantage American forces had over the British during the Revolution, the government’s statement on the results said.

Craig Shirley & Bill Pascoe don't like Jon Huntsman Jr., and in particular they didn't like the speech (CSPAN video, transcript) in which he announced his presidential candidacy ("Jon Huntsman is no Ronald Reagan", The Daily Caller 6/21/2011):

Most Americans are on the right side of the spectrum. They are knowledgeable and far more sophisticated about politics and government than the commentariat gives them credit for.

They are awash in personalities, and are sick of them. They don’t want Kim Kardashian as their president. They want someone of substance and depth and content who uses the personal pronouns “we” and “us” more than he uses “I” and “me,” and who understands what it is about America that makes it great — and will do everything in his power to restore that greatness.

The segment that I've put in bold face is yet another replication of the First-Person-Singular Pronoun trope — but unlike most versions of this complaint, which can only be checked by comparing the relative frequency of FPSPs in comparable speeches of different politicians, this one makes a within-politician claim, and thus can easily be checked by taking a quick look at the particular speech these two political experts are complaining about.

Jon Huntsman, formerly the governor of Utah and ambassador to China, announced he was running for the Republican presidential nomination at a campaign kickoff event today at Liberty State Park in fair Jersey City. Before his announcement, the assembled crowd was treated to an introductory video. Among Huntsman's exceptional qualities listed by the folksy voiceover narrator was this: "Speaks Mandarin Chinese, and Hokkien… whatever that is."

(The relevant bit occurs at about 2:15 in the above video. You can catch the audio on C-SPAN as well.)