Language Log

A few days ago, Geoff Pullum posted a meditation on the role of The Elements of Style in befuddling Americans about the nature of the passive voice ("Drinking the Strunkian Kool-Aid: victims of page 18", 6/6/2009). His point of departure was a passage illustrating the confusion, taken from a 2007 article by Ada Brunstein ("The House of No Personal Pronouns", NYT, 7/22/2007).

Last night, Ms. Brunstein sent me the letter reproduced below, in which she corrects Geoff's  conjecture that Strunk and White were directly responsible for her slip, and graciously offers to enlist (or more exactly, to be hired) as "an active proper-passive promoter".

The Language Log marketing department, bored with refunding the subscription fees of disgruntled readers, is delirious with enthusiasm (or would be, if it existed). But Ms. Brunstein's stated price is a copy of Strunk and White's book, signed and dedicated by Geoff, whose agent is also ontologically challenged. So it may take some time to set up the proposed promotional campaign.

Paul JJ Payack, after all the run-up, has botched the story of the millionth word. The most amusing thing was that he forgot to write a script that would stop updating his headline when the millionth word was hit and exceeded, so at 11:30 a.m. in the UK he had this headline at his Global Language Monitor website:

The English Language WordClock: 1,000,001
0 words until the 1,000,000th Word

Oops! I think that should be minus one words, not zero words until the millionth!

The other thing he screwed up on was the fixing of the choice of word. He let his script decide — not a good idea when the whole point of the exercise is promotion and P.R. I'm not sure how his script works, but what it finally picked as the millionth "word" with at least 25,000 attestations on the web turned out to be: Web 2.0. Oops! First, that isn't a word, it's a phrase containing a noun (web) and a one of those stylish postpositive decimal numeric quantifiers; and second, it is boring boring boring. If phrases containing numbers are allowed, no wonder there are a million words. I was scheduled to go to the BBC Scotland studio and talk about this in a couple of hours, but when the people at the BBC World Service heard that the millionth word was Web 2.0, and that among the runners-up was the two-word Hindi exclamation jai hoo, they dumped the story and told me not to bother going over to the studio. Quite rightly. Payack should have hand-picked a more convincing and likable word.

It is clear that *Kansas hasn't had executed anyone since 1965 is ungrammatical. What was responsible for the editing mistake that led to its appearing in this page on the Wall Street Journal's law blog? Quite possibly, suggested Victor Steinbok to the American Dialect Society mailing list early this morning, a sentence-planning botch that resulted from an attempt at obeying the Strunkian imperative to use the active voice.

Mary Kate Cary ("Barack Obama Journeys From 'Yes We Can' to the Imperial 'I'", U.S. News and World Report, 6/9/2009) joins the media chorus:

"The Great I Am." That's what Dorothy Walker Bush, the matriarch of the Bush family, used to call it when one of her children used too many "I's" in a sentence. Casting it in biblical terms, she'd tell them, "Nobody likes The Great I Am. Don't be talking about yourself." […]

I tell you all this because I've noticed lately that President Obama used to be that way, too. […]

But lately he's moved from the second person to the first person. Apparently I'm not the only one who's picked up on it. Stanley Fish blogs in the New York Times that [… etc. …]

George Will's column earlier this week points out that the president has become "inordinately fond of the first-person singular pronoun," as evidenced in the GM takeover speech. Terence Jeffrey of CSN wrote a similar piece about the same speech titled "I, Barack," talking about the economic implications of the switch from "we" to "I" […]

As pointed out at tedious length in a series of earlier posts, the only trouble with this theory is that Barack Obama uses "The Great I Am" at a significantly lower rate, in comparable speeches and press interactions, than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush did.

The good folks over at Gmail have been busy lately, rolling out several new features of note over the past several weeks. I've recently used their new automatic message translation feature to render a hilarious translation into English of a Spanish message that my father recently sent, and I thought about blogging about that first until I even more recently had the opportunity to test their new mail and contact importing feature. You might think that this is less language-related for this blog, but think again. (And feel free to add your funny message translations in the comments — you know you want to.)

Scarcely a month and a half ago, we were hearing calls for the restitution of the complex / traditional characters on the Mainland.  Now, I am absolutely stunned to hear that the President of Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, himself is calling for the adoption of simplified characters on the island.  Hearing this news is literally as though a bombshell had gone off next to my ears.

The precise formulation of Ma's proposal is interesting:  "We hope the two sides can reach a consensus on (learning to) read standard characters while writing in the simplified ones," Ma told a visiting delegation of US-based Taiwanese community leaders.  This means that the simplified characters would be the dominant, active set and that the traditional / complex (he calls them "standard") characters would be the secondary, passive set.

Early this year, Heidi Harley and I posted a few times about the job market in linguistics. I got the ball rolling with a post about the Linguist List's 2008 job ads. Heidi followed up with a comparison between the job-ad numbers and the indices at ProQuest, and then I put those numbers together.

The combined post told a dispiriting story about the theoretical areas: it looked like there was a serious mismatch between the number of PhDs and the number of jobs for them. I think now, though, that this was based on an unfair comparison. John McCarthy pointed out to me that the ProQuest counts we reported are not relativized to dissertations per se, but rather come from a more general search of ProQuest's databases.

If the ProQuest search term restricts always to (i) dissertations, (ii) the Linguistics subject area, and (iii) the last five years, then one gets much smaller numbers throughout, and the hits themselves seem generally reasonable. Here's a graph comparable to my earlier one, with the same job-ad numbers but the more restrictive ProQuest numbers.

Over the past couple of days, some commenters have complained of superficiality and excessive empiricism in my objections to the spreading media meme of president Obama's allegedly culpable use of first-person pronouns ("Fact-checking George F. Will", 6/7/2009; "Obama's Imperial 'I': spreading the meme", 6/8/2009; "Inaugural pronouns", 6/8/2009).

So this morning, in evaluating Stanley Fish's notion that president Obama's inaugural address used the "royal we", I'll avoid any numbers greater than one. Instead, I'll use traditional humanistic methods to argue that Fish is full of it.

[I'm following up on this morning's post "Obama's Imperial 'I': spreading the meme".]

Stanley Fish ("Yes I can", NYT 6/7/2009) cited the "naked I" of the president's recent rhetoric, allegedly representing a change from the pronominal personality that he displayed during the presidential campaign. But I showed this morning that Obama's recent presidential speeches in fact use first-person singular pronouns at roughly the same rate as his campaign speeches did, or perhaps a little bit less often, judging on the basis of the specific eight speeches that Fish cites. I also showed that overall, Obama's rate of first-person singular pronoun usage is distinctly lower than that of his two predecessors, not (as you might expect from all the fuss) higher.

Fish also cites Obama's inaugural address for its extensive use of the "royal we". So just for fun, having a few minutes to spare, I added a few lines to the script that I used to count pronouns in the cited speeches, and dumped the inaugural addresses of the previous two presidents into the pile of texts that I ran it on.

I guess it's now officially a Media Meme: Obama's "royal we has flowered into the naked 'I'". First Terence Jeffrey ("I, Barack Obama"), then George Will ("Have We Got a Deal for You"), now Stanley Fish ("Yes I can"):

By the time of the address to the Congress on Feb. 24, the royal we has flowered into the naked “I”: “As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress.” “I called for action.” “I pushed for quick action.” “I have told each of my cabinet.” “I’ve appointed a proven and aggressive inspector general.” “I refuse to let that happen.” “I will not spend a single penny.” “I reject the view that says our problems will simply take care of themselves.” “I held a fiscal summit where I pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term.” That last is particularly telling: it says, there’s going to be a second term, I’m already moving fast, and if you don’t want to be left in the dust, you’d better fall in line.

There’s no mistaking what’s going on in the speech delivered last week. No preliminary niceties; just a rehearsal of Obama’s actions and expectations. Eight “I”’s right off the bat: “Just over two months ago I spoke with you… and I laid out what needed to be done.” “From the beginning I made it clear that I would not put any more tax dollars on the line.” “I refused to let those companies become permanent wards of the state.” “I refused to kick the can down the road. But I also recognized the importance of a viable auto industry.” “I decided then…” (He is really the decider.)

The trouble with this idea, as often with the insights of the punditocracy, is that there's no evidence that it's true. Worse, evidence is easily available to disconfirm it.

The opening sentence of George F. Will's latest column ("Have We Got a Deal for You", 6/7/2009):

"I," said the president, who is inordinately fond of the first-person singular pronoun, "want to disabuse people of this notion that somehow we enjoy meddling in the private sector."

This echoes J.B.S. Haldane's quip that the creator, if he exists, must be inordinately fond of beetles; and Will, like Haldane, is presumably proposing an inference about someone's preferences from his actions, not reporting a direct emotional revelation.

So, since I'm one of those narrow-minded fundamentalists who believe that statements can be true or false, and that we should care about the difference, I decided to check. (On Will, not Haldane.)

"My toothbrush is one of four standing upright in a cup on the bathroom sink," wrote Ada Brunstein in ‘The House of No Personal Pronouns’, a 2007 piece in the New York Times Fashion & Style section. "These toothbrushes belong to me, my boyfriend, his wife and her lover."

Brunstein often stays at the house with her married boyfriend, who co-owns it with his estranged wife, who also sometimes lives in the house, together with her boyfriend. This edgy domestic relationship between two couples, one half of each of which had together once formed a different couple, depends on a delicate avoidance of topics such as the evidence of the still-undissolved marriage. There have been negotiations concerning phone calls and visits, and in addition (for this is Language Log, not Open Marriage Lifestyle Log) linguistic negotiations. Brunstein's boyfriend says "the house" now, not "our house"; and:

He has adopted the passive voice to make it easier on me. I once stood in front of a bookcase in the kitchen, three shelves of which hold an impressive collection of salt and pepper shakers from across the country.

"You collect salt and pepper shakers?" I asked.

"There are salt and pepper shakers that have come into the house over the years," he said.

Yes, it's that elusive butterfly of passivity again.

It's almost over. The English Language WordClock is ticking inexorably towards its zero hour early Wednesday morning, marking the imagined birth of the mythical millionth English word. But what will happen then?

The Million Word March FAQ over at the Global Language Monitor is silent on this subject. None of the journalists interviewing Paul Payack, the PR genius behind this exercise, have asked him the simple question, "And then what?"

Mr. Payack has volunteered the opinion that "The million word milestone brings to notice the coming of age of English as the first truly global Language".  But a disturbing tweet from Prof. Warren Rice at Miskatonic Community College warns of a darker possibility:

The millionth word is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not. Our only hope is t