More (dis?)fluent interpolations
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(…and also more /bl/ lenition…)
For the latest problematic clip from J.D. Vance's past, see Hafiz Rashid, "J.D. Vance Bashed Immigration With Podcast Host Who Advocated for Rape", TNR 8/15/2024:
J.D. Vance’s 2021 appearance on a podcast episode is drawing some negative attention thanks to the extremist views of its host, as well as Vance’s own comments.
The podcast, Jack Murphy Live, interviewed Vance before his run for the Senate in Ohio. The host Jack Murphy, whose real name is John Goldman, has a history of expressing abhorrent views on rape and immigration.
In one since-deleted blog post, Murphy wrote that “behind even the most ardent feminist facade is a deep desire to be dominated and even degraded,” adding that “rape is the best therapy for the problem. Feminists need rape.” […]
Vance’s comments on Murphy’s podcast also decried what he believed were the negative aspects of immigration.
“You had this massive wave of Italian, Irish, and German immigration right? And that had its problems, its consequences,” Vance told Murphy. “You had higher crime rates, you had these ethnic enclaves, you had inter-ethnic conflict in the country where you really hadn’t had that before.”
The story has also been picked up by at least one overseas outlet so far — Alana Loftus, "JD Vance blames higher crime rates on 'wave of Irish immigration' in resurfaced clip", Irish Star 8/15/2024. But this is Language Log, not Political-Self-Foot-Shooting Log, so my focus will be on the some characteristics of how Vance talks in that podcast, not on the political content.
The source of the fuss is a tweet by Jacqueline Sweet, viewed 2.7 million times so far:
JD Vance in 2021, while discussing earlier waves of immigration to the US:
"You had this massive wave of Italian, Irish and German immigration and that had its problems, its consequences. You had higher crime rates, you had these ethnic enclaves, you had inter-ethnic conflict in… pic.twitter.com/SQNPwaPBLx
— Jacqueline Sweet (@JSweetLI) August 15, 2024
(I've added the audio, since the author of the tweet has blocked outsiders…)
yeah you know I- I think it's one of those things that's evolved over time, right
so- so obviously you had this massive wage-
wave of Italian- primarily (like-) Italian uh Irish and German immigration, right
and- and- and that had- had it's problems
right it- it had its consequences you had
higher crime rates, you had these sort of ethnic enclaves developing
you had inter-ethnic conflict in the country where you really hadn't had that ((before))
The main thing that struck me (linguistically) about this clip was the rapidly-repeated phrase-initial words — for some past discussion, see "Fluent 'disfluencies' again" (9/3/2022) and the posts linked therein.
But transcribing the passage, I was also struck by the pronunciation of "problems", which is reduced to (something close to) a single phonetic syllable — reminiscent of the things happening to /b/-initial syllables in (some performances of) "Probably":
Zeroing in on the performance of "problems":
The strings of rapidly-repeated phrase-initial words in that passage are not an isolated phenomenon — here's another semi-random sample, starting around 25:22.6 in the same interview:
right I mean that I think that there- there are two different ideas here right
so- so one is- is like
you know I- I-
there's this guy Curtis Yarvin
who's written um about some of these things
and so- so one is to basically accept
that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself right
Let me make clear that I'm not criticizing J.D. Vance's speech style. Most people exhibit similar behavior — and as I noted about one of the speakers quoted in "Fluent 'disfluencies' again" (9/3/2022)
I should emphasize that General Ryder is a fluent and effective speaker, as you'd expect for someone appointed to be Pentagon Press Secretary. Although there's a lot of individual and contextual variation in the relative frequency and phrasal distribution of the different sorts of "disfluencies", good communicators often provide plenty of data.
Update — On the politic0-cultural dimension, there's this…
Haamu said,
August 16, 2024 @ 11:31 am
I find a few other linguistic aspects of interest:
First, the other repeated interpolation that seems more fluent than dis- is "right," which seems to fulfill a dual purpose of being a filler and soliciting agreement.
Second, his use of demonstratives ("this massive … wave," "these sort of ethnic enclaves") reminds me of our long-ago discussion of Sarah Palin's use of that to signal familiarity and possibly to attempt self-substantiation.
Finally, I find the repeated use of "you" (in "you had") intriguing and wonder if that indicates anything about his thought processes. Of course, some will insist that "you had" is simply an idiomatic form of "there was," but I'm left to wonder who he thinks "you" really is. For instance, to say "you had inter-ethnic conflict in the country where you really hadn't had that ((before))" suggests that "you" excludes the perspective and relevance of indigenous peoples, who obviously experienced inter-ethnic conflict from the get-go.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 16, 2024 @ 2:30 pm
That usage of "you" is basically wiktionary's sense 7: "(indefinite personal pronoun) Anyone, one; an unspecified individual or group of individuals (as subject or object). [from 16th c.]." It is a mistake to take "you" as referring to the speaker's actual interlocutor or even some hypothesized/imagined/idealized audience. That's just not how the common phrases using that sense 7 work. Haamu's point re overlooking pre-1830 conflict between colonists and indigenes would have exactly the same degree of merit* had Vance said instead e.g. "There was inter-ethnic conflict in the country where that really hadn't occurred before."
It's such a common usage that I am puzzled by why Haamu would find its use intriguing or to indicate anything noteworthy about the user's thought processes. One might fairly note that it's an informal-register usage, and students would be well advised to avoid it in written work for teachers who have negative view of informal register usages in academic written assignments, but we are now many decades removed from it being particularly noteworthy that a candidate for high public office in the U.S. would deviate from formal register in an interview. If anything, the brief detour into semi-archaic formal register elsewhere in the interview (with the sequence "one is to basically accept that …") strikes me as slightly more noteworthy.
*FWIW I think some Americans think of "ethnic conflict" or "inter-ethnic conflict" as contrasting with "racial conflict," with the ethnic groups in conflict with each other needing to be of the same "race" before you'd use the former label(s) rather than the latter. I don't know that this is actually a very helpful distinction to maintain, but I think there are people out there who do think that way. But I'm not betting any money one way or another whether that's what motivated Vance's choice of words.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
August 16, 2024 @ 5:21 pm
I fully agree with JW Brewer, and I would add that Vance's use of this is in the same informal-but-not-really-noteworthy category as impersonal you, just several generations younger. I started noticing it on YouTube some time ago, and I have this feeling ;) that there was this guy in front of me that was… instead of a guy is just a marker of a modern young-adult story-telling register.
(And it's eerily similar to what has been happening, probably for a somewhat longer time, in my native Slavic language that is canonically claimed to lack articles.)
Paul Garrett said,
August 16, 2024 @ 9:50 pm
As a somewhat older person, perhaps pointlessly sensitized to language shifts, I found myself wanting to point out that "shooting yourself in the foot" originally meant acquisition of a (fake, but real) wound, to avoid participation in any further combat. Surely relatively few people accidentally shot themselves in the foot, so most such episodes would have been to avoid combat. If avoiding combat was one's goal, then that would have been a _success_, though at some price. Not a failure. :)
Bloix said,
August 17, 2024 @ 2:26 am
Actual to shot oneself in the foot originally meant to shoot yourself in the foot by accident. If you run an ngram on "shot himself in the foot" with a date limitation 1800-1900 you will get many hits from medical and legal records and from newspapers reporting accidental shootings from pistols carried in belts that hit the gun-carrier in the foot. Apparently this was a fairly common accident.
As the modern metaphor means to accidentally make a mistake that damages one's own cause and thus means the opposite of the WWI practice, I suspect that the metaphor may come from the early meaning. Perhaps someone could do some research.
Paul Garrett said,
August 17, 2024 @ 6:00 pm
@Bloix, yes, your interpretation about "dumb" accidents was my understanding, also, until several years ago, when "I read somewhere" that quite a few such "accidents" were staged, to avoid serious combat. Yes, _someone_ could/should look into this. :)
Jenny Chu said,
August 17, 2024 @ 10:37 pm
In the area of Pennsylvania where I spent some time as a child – what many people would describe as a hillbilly locale – it was common to say, "You'll have that!" It means, "Such things happen" or "That exists." I would guess that Vance's "You have…" is similar.
RfP said,
August 18, 2024 @ 12:57 am
Urban Northern Californian, born in the fifties, and “you have” sounds perfectly ordinary to me—I can imagine an early-career Jack Nicholson character saying it. It’s somewhat informal, but not exclusively so.
Similarly, “Ya see, there’s this guy I know who can take care of that for ya” would sound just fine in movies going all the way back to the beginning of the Talkies (except maybe substitute “d” for “th” in the thirties and early forties), and my friends and I would use “this” in similar constructions from the time we were capable of fully articulate speech. But it’s historically pretty informal, in my experience.