Language Log

A note from Bob Ladd:

I just picked up and put away a book I'd bought in a second-hand bookstore before going to Romania in 1978, called "The Balkans in our Time", by Robert Lee Wolff, a mid-century Harvard historian.  I realized that he's yet another example of a generalization that must somehow tell us something about how language works: Anglo-elite American academic historians often use their full middle name.  Samuel Eliot Morrison and Henry Steele Commager come readily to mind, but Robert Lee Wolff fits the pattern, as does another more recent writer, Walter Russell Mead.  And Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell, was a historian. It's hard to search for these on Google, but I'm pretty sure I've noticed others, and I can't think of people who use their middle name and *aren't* American academic historians, except for good ol' boys like Billy Bob Thornton and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Nobody does sarcastic invective like the English, and Steve Connor, the science editor of The Independent, recently demonstrated his command of the form. But he started out in a shaky moral position, and he got his facts wrong, so it didn't turn out well for him.

Here at Language Log Plaza, we've been following the linguistic angles of the Gov. Mark Sanford story ever since he mysteriously went "out of pocket." (See: "Out of pocket," "The biggest self of self is indeed self," "Doing stupid," and "If I wanted to know that I knew that I knew.") But the lasting contribution of the Sanford saga to the English language may very well be the sudden spawning of a political euphemism: "hiking the Appalachian trail."

Mark Peters is the resident euphemism expert on the Visual Thesaurus website, rounding up circumlocutions old and new for his monthly column, Evasive Maneuvers. His latest column, "Hiking the Euphemistic Trail," is a Sanford special.

Gov. Mark Sanford continues to be a source of statements that are linguistically interesting on a variety of levels.  In the same AP interview where he confessed to having "done stupid",  he explained his value system in terms that raise several significant philosophical issues: "Everybody's got their own value system, but to me, even if it's a place that I could never go, if I wanted to know that I knew that I knew, if that's more important to me than running for president, that's my prerogative as a human being."

I'll leave to others such theological questions as whether the idea that "everybody's got their own value system" is consistent with whatever brand of Christianity the governor subscribes to. My interest here is what he meant by saying that he trashed his political career because "I wanted to know that I knew that I knew".