Language Log

[This is really a comment on a comment on one of our recent posts about the sociopolitics of g-dropping — I've set it up as a separate post because it's too long to fit gracefully in the comments section.]

I really like Mark's "empathetic -in'" in place of "g-dropping," though it may require a public campaign to make the substitution. Just by way of a footnote to that post, I did a "Fresh Air" piece on accent and authenticity last week which ended with some comments on the development of Palin's g-dropping (with video clips) and concluded she has learned over the years to do it in roughly the same sorts of contexts that Obama does. Here's the last part of that piece:

In a recent exchange ("Pinker on Palin's 'nucular'", 10/5/2008; "Pinker contra Nunberg re nuclear/nucular", 10/17/2008; "Nucular riposte", 10/18/2008), Steven Pinker and Geoffrey Nunberg disagreed, among other things, about whether President George W. Bush is engaging in "conscious linguistic slumming" when he uses the pronunciation commonly written as "nucular". Geoff argued that

George Bush … can't be exculpated for saying "nucular." After all, it isn't likely that that version was frequently heard at Andover, Yale, or the Kennebunkport dinner table. In his mouth, it's what I've described as a "faux-bubba" pronunciation. … And … deliberately down-shifting to a misanalyzed pronuncation of nuclear is a lot more culpable as linguistic slumming goes than merely dropping a g now and again.

But Steve countered that

People generally end up with the accents of their late childhood and early adolescent peers, so Midland and Houston were the formative influences on Bush's accent, rather than Kennebunkport and Andover.

I have no instinct about the relative culpability of "going nucular" and "g-dropping". But I do feel that the pronunciation of -ing is much more useful as a sociopolitical variable than the pronunciation of nuclear is — it's much commoner, in the first place, and it's also much more likely to vary. Furthermore, it allows us to balance our discussion in partisan terms, because the current candidate who deploys this variable in the most politically interesting way is Barack Obama.

Steve Pinker understates the case when he says that there's a master's thesis in "nucular" studies: I envision dissertations, conferences, endowed chairs, journals, broken marriages…

[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.

Following some of the news yesterday, on the radio and in print, I was struck by a quote from U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson that was repeated several times:

Government owning a stake in any private U.S. company is objectionable to most Americans — me included.

(The quote can be found several places, such as near the end of this WSJ blog post.)

Another one from the news yesterday: at 6pm every weekday, my local public radio station broadcasts one of the three daily editions of the BBC's The World Today. In one of the interviews (at around 20 mins. after the hour, if anyone finds the audio), an American whose name I unfortunately didn't catch was comparing the U.S. bank bailout plan with the corresponding plan in the U.K., and he was attempting to argue that the U.S. plan was somehow "less socialist" than the U.K. plan because (for various reasons I'm ill-equipped to understand or critique) the U.S. plan is deliberately temporary in a way that the U.K. plan is supposedly not. Anyway, he summed up his argument like this:

This is a temporary situation and we'd like to keep it that way.

And I suppose that the British are in a permanent situation that they'd like to change at some point?

In 1934, the philologist A. S. C. Ross wrote a review of the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary Supplement (Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 35: 128-132) in which he referred to taboo words as "mumfordish" vocabulary. He used the same word again in the same year in a short note in Transactions of the Philological Society (volume 33, issue 1, page 99), and again made it clear that for him it was a synonym for "taboo" or "obscene" as applied to lexical items. Charlotte Brewer of Oxford University, an expert on the history of the OED (author of Treasure-house of the Language: The Living OED and creator of the marvellous Examining the OED website), mentioned in a paper presented at the ISLE-1 conference in Freiburg last week that she was baffled by the word mumfordish. So am I. Can any Language Log reader shed serious (rather than speculative) light on its etymology? Comments are open.

Those who follow LL's posts on the public presentation of science may be interested in a recent essay by Neal Young, John Ioannidis, and Omar Al-Ubaydli , discussed in the Economist under the title "Publish and be wrong".

The original essay is Neal S. Young, John Ioannidis, Omar Al-Ubaydli, "Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science", PLoS Medicine.

In the past, Ioannidis has explained "Why most published research findings are false". And that's before the press gets hold of them.

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.