Language Log

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.

There's an extraordinary amount of anticipation about Barack Obama's inaugural address, due in a few hours. A small sample of the anticipatory commentary: "The speech"; "'The Speech': An Experts' Guide"; "Inaugural Words: 1789 to the Present"; "Obama's Inaugural Address: Great Expectations"; and literally thousands of other articles. We've contributed our mite, in the form of Geoff Pullum's post "Presidential inaugurals: the form and the content", 1/15/2009 (though this belongs to a somewhat smaller body of work, the meta-anticipatory commentary). No doubt after the event there'll an even greater flood of discussion, meta- and otherwise.

Last night I saw a variant of the following bumper sticker on a car driving around my neighborhood (click image to enlarge; original found here):

The variant I saw had white lettering on a blue background — that is, no flag — and the wording of the second part was "if you're reading it in English, thank a soldier". (Other variations ask that you thank a veteran, the military, a U.S. soldier, …) Both wordings are a little off, if you think about it: if you can read the text of the bumper sticker, then of course you can read it in English (and of course you're reading it in English). But that's not the point of this post, especially given that I've also found a more sensibly-worded variant here ("If you can read this, thank a teacher… and since it is in English, thank a soldier.")

Yesterday's news brings another constructional innovation, courtesy of Agence France Presse ("Americans giving Obama extraordinary support: polls", 1/18/2009):

A survey conducted by The New York Times and CBS News found a US public eager to give the president-elect a wide berth as he attempts to turn around a faltering US economy, tackle global warming, help solve the intractable Middle East peace process, along with a plethora of other mammoth challenges.

Tobin Harshaw, "Weekend Opinionator: The Battle Over the Battle in Gaza", 1/17/2009:

Even natural allies are wan to fully praise anybody who devotes a long article to touching the third rail, witness Gerecht’s letter to Goldberg.

The context makes it clear (I think) that Harshaw means this to mean "… are reluctant to fully praise…".

Last week, there was an interesting Ask MetaFilter thread about how to find "a list of all the English words that can be traced back to a given root word" ("Word histories and dirt lions") , in which Language Hat helpfully linked to the American Heritage Dictionary's "lists of Indo-European and Semitic roots" as a partial answer.

Those interested in such things — and the response to Don Ringe's recent posts here shows that there are many of you — might also want to take a look at some of the explanatory material from the same source: Cal Watkin's article "Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans" and the "Guide to Appendix I", John Huehnergard's "Proto-Semitic Language and Culture" and the "Guide to Appendix II".

If you want a sense of just what a hole the right finds itself in these days, consider the recent press release from the anti-abortion American Life League  headed "KRISPY KREME CELEBRATES OBAMA WITH PRO-ABORTION DOUGHNUTS." It goes on to say:

The next time you stare down a conveyor belt of slow-moving, hot, sugary glazed donuts at your local Krispy Kreme you just might be supporting President-elect Barack Obama's radical support for abortion on demand… The doughnut giant released the following statement yesterday:

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. (NYSE: KKD) is honoring American's sense of pride and freedom of choice on Inauguration Day, by offering a free doughnut of choice to every customer on this historic day, Jan. 20. By doing so, participating Krispy Kreme stores nationwide are making an oath to tasty goodies — just another reminder of how oh-so-sweet "free" can be.

…The unfortunate reality of a post Roe v. Wade America is that "choice" is synonymous with abortion access and celebration of 'freedom of choice' is a tacit endorsement of abortion rights on demand…. Celebrating [Obama's] inauguration with "Freedom of Choice" doughnuts – only two days before the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision to decriminalize abortion – is not only extremely tacky, it's disrespectful and insensitive and makes a mockery of a national tragedy.

A number of anti-abortion bloggers have joined the ALL in urging readers to make their indignation known to the company, while others have confined themselves to suggesting that the promotion was at best clueless. "To a majority of Americans," the commenter on one blog wrote, "the words ['freedom of choice'] do not connote liberty, or 'tasty goodies' or patriotism at all.  These words are synonymous with the painful tragedy of abortion."

And conservatives wonder why their movement is in trouble?

Yesterday brought some news about "The Marthambles", a disease mentioned in five of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels (DI 123, RM 164, NC 132, 149, WDS 130, YA 226, for the cognoscenti). The earliest of these (Desolation Island) was published in 1978, and is set in 1811 or 1812. Marthambles is not found in the OED, but according to an interview in The Patrick O'Brian Newsletter (volume 3, issue 1, March 1994), O'Brian explained that "Marthambles is a very fine word that I found in a quack's pamphlet of the late 17th or early 18th century".

However, the word is also used in Dorothy Dunnett's historical novel The Ringed Castle (fifth of the "Lymond Chronicles"), which was published in 1971 and deals with fictional events taking place in the year 1555. This raises a set of questions whose answers must be mildly embarrassing to someone: perhaps the OED missed a world used in English medical practice for three centuries; perhaps Patrick O'Brian learned a word from Dorothy Dunnett but claimed to have found it for himself; perhaps Dorothy Dunnett used a late-18th-century word in a mid-16th-century novel. (Trust me, some people care about these things.)

Beginning with a few sneak previews at smaller film festivals prior to its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival a year ago, The Linguists has been touring around the world — sometimes with David or Greg available for discussion, sometimes without — with exclusive screenings for lucky audiences. There are still a few such screenings left in various places, but soon many more of us in the United States will be able to enjoy the television premiere of The Linguists on PBS: on or after February 26, depending on your local station.

Note: thus far only Alabama Public Television seems to be on the ball about posting the premiere in its online broadcast schedule. I welcome links to other updated PBS station schedules in the comments.

(The PBS premiere is noted at the end of yesterday's Q&A with David and Greg in GOOD Magazine; tip o' the hat to Ben Zimmer.)