Language Log

Opinions were strikingly divided about Obama's inaugural speech, and not necessarily along ideological lines. George Will called it lyrical and Pat Buchanan called it "the work of a mature and serious man"; but in National Review, Yuval Levin said that within a few weeks not a line of it would be remembered, and Rich Lowry spoke of "overwrought clichés and poor writing." At the New Republic, John Judis called it a "disappointing muddle" that "got no style points," while John McWhorter, moonlighting from his Language Log day job, called the speech "worthy of marble" and pointed in particular to Black English influences on Obama's cadences, though he didn't develop the point in detail. And Stanley Fish pronounced the speech a paradigm of paratactic prose, which in its nature "lends itself to leisurely and loving study," and having duly allowed himself to "linger over each alliteration [and] parse each emphasis," predicted that it would be studied in a thousand classrooms: "canonization has already arrived."

Those are the criteria people always bring to this sort of address: Was it memorable? Marmorealizable? Did he stick the landing? It's understandable, a way of flattering ourselves that ritual oratory still matters. But I have the feeling Obama and his writers knew better.

Of course it was a very memorable event, on a historic, make that epochal, occasion. And the speech is sure to be memorialized — in fact Penguin Books is already on it.

But if the speech was well turned, it wasn't memorable. What's more, it didn't need to be memorable. It couldn't have been memorable. And my guess is that nobody tried too hard to make it memorable. As I put the point in a "Fresh Air" piece that aired today [full text here ]:

Obama’s speech made all the required moves: it was grave but not doleful; resolute but not belligerent, eloquent but not grandiloquent. Its acknowledgments were eclectic: Biblical allusions, a nod to Tom Paine, a shout-out to Jerome Kern.

But it wasn’t especially memorable. If we still lived in an age when people compiled collections of great speeches for pupils to memorize and declaim on national holidays, the editor would more likely go with the moving speech that Obama made in Grant Park on the night of the election.

But that isn't necessarily a weakness of the speech.

What? You haven't heard of the Pomegranate phone? It's "[t]he ultimate all-in-one device", going "where no phone has gone before". It's amazing. I want one, even more than I want an iPhone (and I want one of those pretty bad, so you can just imagine).

The Pomegranate's niftiest feature is probably the Global Voice Translator, illustrated here:

(I say "probably" because the niftiest feature is really the coffee brewer, but this is Language Log, so I had to go with the GVT.)

[ Hat-tip: Andy Kehler. ]

Just last week I reported on a couple of accounts describing Barack Obama's conversational skills in Indonesian, a language he learned living in Indonesia from age six to ten. In both of the accounts, Obama was said to handle conventional Indonesian greeting routines with aplomb. Now thanks to ABC News we have the video evidence, from an exchange that President Obama had with State Department staffer Charles Silver on Thursday as the president worked the State Department rope-line. Silver has been stationed in Jakarta at various times since 1969 and now works in the State Department's Office of Inspector General.

Published today: R. D. Gray, A. J. Drummond, and S. J. Greenhill, "Language Phylogenies Reveal Expansion Pulses and Pauses in Pacific Settlement", Science 323(5913):479:483, 23 January 2009. The abstract:

Debates about human prehistory often center on the role that population expansions play in shaping biological and cultural diversity. Hypotheses on the origin of the Austronesian settlers of the Pacific are divided between a recent "pulse-pause" expansion from Taiwan and an older "slow-boat" diffusion from Wallacea. We used lexical data and Bayesian phylogenetic methods to construct a phylogeny of 400 languages. In agreement with the pulse-pause scenario, the language trees place the Austronesian origin in Taiwan approximately 5230 years ago and reveal a series of settlement pauses and expansion pulses linked to technological and social innovations. These results are robust to assumptions about the rooting and calibration of the trees and demonstrate the combined power of linguistic scholarship, database technologies, and computational phylogenetic methods for resolving questions about human prehistory.

An unusually clear explanation of the project, along with a great deal of background information, is available on the web here.

Griffy and Zippy play with the vocabulary of art supplies, and more:

(A crow quill in this context is a crow-quill nib, which — according to Mark Mandel, who's set me straight on this point — is "made of metal, presumably with the same line properties as a literal crow quill but more durable"; illustrated here. And Bristol is Bristol board/paper, a heavyweight paper used by illustrators.)

Among the many discussions of yesterday's inaugural address, one that struck me was Eve Fairbanks' question "Why'd Obama Talk about George Washington?" She observes that "in the last half of the last century or so, George Washington was appropriated by right-wingers as 'their' founder"; and concludes that

I thought Obama ended his speech with Washington today in order to tweak his image. He's not here to change everything about America, or even to change everything that his progressive supporters don't like, the end of the speech said. He's here to safeguard it like the unflappable Washington, to "carr[y] forth that great gift of freedom and deliver … it safely to future generations."

This rings true — certainly the theme of continuity with America's political past was central to the speech, and I'm sure that the reaction of Ms. Fairbanks' conservative mother was not unanticipated:

[M]y staunchly Republican mom told me after watching Obama's speech that "one of the things that has always nagged at me about Obama, as a conservative, is, 'Does this man care about the founding? Does he even think about it?' So I was astonished to hear it invoked … the evocation of Washington was great." And the story Obama told about George worked perfectly in the moment: Its images of "shores of an icy river" and men huddled against the bitter cold feathered in with today's weather.

But it's worth remembering that the Washington of 1776 was the general of a revolutionary army, and the words that he ordered to be read to his men were written by Tom Paine, a radical agitator.

When Chief Justice John Roberts and Barack Obama made a hash of the presidential oath of office on Tuesday, most early commentators — including me — assumed it didn't really matter what they said, since Obama had officially become president at noon (shortly before they actually got to the oath). But some legal scholars pointed out that the oath is still required under the Constitution and argued that a "do-over" should be performed, just to be safe. Today, the do-over proponents won out, and at 7:35 pm EST, Roberts again swore in Obama in the Map Room of the White House. From the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire:

“We decided it was so much fun,” Obama joked before again stating the words written in the Constitution. “Are you ready to take the oath?” Roberts asked. “I am, and we’re going to do it very slowly,” Obama quipped.
The oath took 25 seconds, and the recitation was flawless this time. “Congratulations, again,” Roberts said. “Thank you, sir,” Obama replied.
“The bad news for the [press] pool is there’s 12 more [inaugural] balls,” Obama joked.

The "Bushisms" industry, mined so thoroughly by Slate's Jacob Weisberg for eight long years, is now a thing of the past. But Weisberg's colleague at Slate, Christopher Beam, got an exclusive scoop on a behind-the-scenes eleventh-hour Bushism when he managed to get into a farewell party for the outgoing administration on Sunday night. Here's what Bush told the crowd, according to Beam:

"I am glad we made this journey," he went on. Then he engaged in a little reminiscence. "Remember the time in 2003 when Bartlett came to work all hung over?" Laughs. "Nothing ever changes."
He continued: "We never shruck—"
"Shirked!" someone yelled.
"Shirked," Bush corrected, smiling. "You might have shirked; I shrucked. I mean we took the deals head on."

For a couple of days before the inaugural, the most emailed article on the NYT website was Stanley Fish's column "The Last Professor" (1/18/2009), which returns to a favorite theme of his:

In previous columns and in a recent book I have argued that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world.

See "Après Fish, le déluge?", 1/15/2008, for some discussion of his earlier discussions. His reason for revisting the allegedly endangered purity of higher education, this time, is to review a book:

This view of higher education as an enterprise characterized by a determined inutility has often been challenged, and the debates between its proponents and those who argue for a more engaged university experience are lively and apparently perennial. The question such debates avoid is whether the Oakeshottian ideal (celebrated before him by Aristotle, Kant and Max Weber, among others) can really flourish in today’s educational landscape. It may be fun to argue its merits (as I have done), but that argument may be merely academic – in the pejorative sense of the word – if it has no support in the real world from which it rhetorically distances itself. In today’s climate, does it have a chance?

In a new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the University,” Frank Donoghue (as it happens, a former student of mine) asks that question and answers “No.”

Determined inutility is one thing — Prof. Fish is free to choose that path if he wants to — but determined ignorance of history is something else again.

I did an inauguration piece, too, for Newsday, on a quick turnaround; I'll post the link to the full piece here when it goes up. My general take, though, was that Obama had recycled his historical models with his foot on the rhetorical damper soft pedals:

Commentators had been looking back to Lincoln, King, FDR, and JFK for models. But while the speech might bring to mind all of those, it was more subdued and restrained. In place of Roosevelt's 1933 remonstrance of the "callous and selfish wrongdoing. . . in banking and business," Obama offered a nonspecific rebuke of "greed and irresponsibility on the part of some," immediately balanced by a reminder of "our collective failure to make hard choices." And FDR's famous warning against "fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror" became a caution about "a sapping of confidence across our land."

In fact the most vivid evocation of the Depression era was in the summons to "pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America," an allusion to Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields's “Start All Over Again,” the anthem to pluck and resilience that Fred and Ginger sang in the 1936 Swingtime.

There was more, on Obama's venture in polyptoton, a term that doesn't crop up a whole lot even here on LanguageLog. But one good turn is enough for now.

The first Language Log post on today's inaugural might have been Bill Poser's numerical gotcha, and the second one might have been Ben Zimmer's dissection of the Roberts/Obama oath flub, but the first Language Log commentary, at least in some sense of that phrase, was my interview with PRI's The World. The interview began shortly after 1:00, as soon after the speech as I could hike the 10 blocks or so to the WXPN studios and meet up with the producer who kindly guided me to a microphone.

It should be aired sometime later today, in some form — "we'll rip it to shreds in editing", said the host in a friendly tone. The interview gave me renewed respect for the talking heads who need to think of something coherent and interesting to say about events as they unfold, so in this case I'll be happy to ripped to shreds, as long as they reassemble me in a not-too-stupid-sounding way.

Meanwhile, here are the notes that I took with me to the interview, fleshed out a bit in the interests of coherence.

Chief Justice John Roberts' administration of the presidential oath to Barack Obama was far from smooth. Early reports differ in saying who stumbled: NBC and ABC say the flub was Roberts', while the AP says it was Obama's. I think both men were a bit nervous, and the error that emerged from their momentary disfluency came down to a problem of adverbial placement.

President Obama's inauguration speech contains an error that may well be of linguistic origin. He said: "Forty-four Americans have now taken the Presidential oath". That is false. Obama is the 43d American to take the Presidential oath. Obama's slip is probably due to the fact that he is accounted the 44th President.