What did Rich Lowry say?

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Yesterday, Alejandra Caraballo tweeted:

The editor in chief of the National Review just said the N word in regards to Haitians and Megyn Kelly ignores it.

Andy McCarthy responded:

Ridiculous. @richlowry (not tagged here, natch) obviously got crossed up between 'immigrants' (short i) and migrants (long i) — started mispronouncing "migrants" with short i; instantly corrected himself with no embarrassment because it was patently a mispronunciation. Geez.

And Rich Lowry agreed:

Yep, this is exactly what happened—I began to mispronounce the word “migrants” and caught myself halfway through

Ben Zimmer emailed me:

Got sent this from a friend, who was hoping to see some analysis of whether the initial consonant on the misspeak here is /m/ or /n/. (Since the previous consonant is the final /n/ in "Haitian," there may be some gestural overlap.)

Here's the full clip from Alejandra Caraballo's tweet:

A transcript of Lowry's part of the clip:

I love- I think it was in- in that interview
where Dana Bash says ((you know))
"police have gone through eleven months of recordings of calls
and they've only found two Springfield residents calling
to complain about Haitian ((??)) n- m- uh migrants
taking
geese
from ponds, only two calls and
I think one lesson of this whole story
people don't care about geese
people really hate geese
you know they- they-
all things considered I think
people'd prefer Haitian migrants
to come and take the geese off the golf course, right
So it's- it's pets- it's uh the cats and dogs that's become the-
the standard, gee- geese clearly don't matter

And the contested phrase:

to complain about Haitian ((??)) n- m- uh migrants

Just the part that I've transcribed as "Haitian ((???))", with a spectrogram:

It's easy to hear (and see) why Caraballo heard and wrote what she did — phonetically, ((???))) is clearly [ˡnɪgɚ].

The /nn/ nasal reflex of "Haitian n…" is 95 milliseconds long, and thus clearly represents a sequence of a syllable-final and a syllable-initial nasal. The stable acoustics of the  nasal murmur isn't consistent with re-articulation from /n/ to /m/ part-way through. And the formant transitions from the nasal consonant into the following [ɪ] vowel (F2 starting at 1900 Hz) indicate a coronal rather than labial place of articulation.

That conclusion is made more persuasive by comparing the next bits, where Lowry produces a sequence of false starts that might be transcribed phonetically as [n- mʔ- ə-] before going on to say "migrants":

So McCarthy's explanation is wrong: Lowry did not "[start] mispronouncing 'migrants' with short i". 

However, Lowry is clearly in speech-error mode, and what he said after "Haitian" is clearly a substitution for "migrants", and "immigration" does offer a confusable phoneme sequence.

So what he said is clear, in phonetic terms: it was [ˡnɪgɚ]. As for why he said it, there's a range of explanations from a word-substitution error, perhaps of the Freudian slip variety, to an innocent phonemic scramble of the general type that McCarthy proposes.

 

 



21 Comments »

  1. fev said,

    September 17, 2024 @ 7:54 am

    Thoughts on the McCarthyite “short i/long i” bit? Seems to me that if Lowry was reaching for “immigrant,” he wouldn’t have had that extra syllable, unless “immigerant” is one of those new coinages like “Bigrant.”

  2. charles antaki said,

    September 17, 2024 @ 8:02 am

    The Reverend Bayes would be unexcited. Just going at it from prior probabilities, the two word conjunction "Haitian [N word plural]" must be hugely lower than "Haitian immigrants" or "Haitian migrants".
    G-hits check (admittedly from a UK ISP) respectively:
    1,100
    11,500,000
    22,800,000

  3. Scott P. said,

    September 17, 2024 @ 8:32 am

    Charles, your prior probabilities should reflect that Lowry is a massive racist.

  4. Pierre Delecto said,

    September 17, 2024 @ 9:02 am

    The video clearly shows Lowery starting with an "M." Time to move on.

  5. Gene Callahan said,

    September 17, 2024 @ 9:20 am

    I’m not a rich Lowery fan, but can you offer any evidence at all that he is a “massive racist”. Some actual quotes from somewhere indicating this?

  6. Benjamin E. Orsatti said,

    September 17, 2024 @ 9:21 am

    Oh, never mind then; let's just drift away from our respective corporis, the mystery is solved — somebody on the internet just said somebody else is a massive racist, so we can all go home edified now. Sure glad the internet is around to help us soar to far-flung moralistic conclusions about people we've never actually met so that we can feel better about our own peccadillos, no?

  7. Haamu said,

    September 17, 2024 @ 4:00 pm

    Granted, "massive" is a red herring — as would be any further speculation about the motivations of commenters, who, for most of us, are also "people we've never actually met."

    A preferable (although perhaps no less distracting) version of Scott P.'s comment would have been, "Charles, your prior probabilities should reflect that Lowry spoke or misspoke in the process of apologizing for, or at least minimizing, some truly hateful, racist lies."

    But back to topic. I'm wondering how convincing others find this explanation:

    @richlowry … obviously got crossed up between 'immigrants' (short i) and migrants (long i)

    To me, it seems unlikely that Lowry actually began to say "immigrants." The problem is the stress difference between the two words. How likely is it that someone who was starting to say "immigrants" would elide the stressed initial syllable and shift the stress to the second?

    So, at best this is some sort of weird jumbling of both words rather than a truncated substitution of one for the other. But that's just enough to make Lowry's explanation that he "began to mispronounce the word 'migrants'" plausible.

    Add to that the utter lack of compunction he shows (my judgment based on the video) upon correcting himself, and I doubt he had the N-word in mind — regardless of the immediate context of this utterance or the extended context of what anyone might make of his career and publicly expressed views.

  8. Seong of Baekje said,

    September 17, 2024 @ 11:20 pm

    Hate on his politics all you want, but the idea that someone like Lowry throws around n bombs is laughable. Wrong generation, wrong personality type.

  9. bks said,

    September 18, 2024 @ 5:40 am

    I think someone of his political persuasion who went to high school and college in Virginia in the 1980's might be familiar with the word, Seong.

  10. Vanya said,

    September 18, 2024 @ 8:09 am

    I agree with Seong. As a white person from the same basic generation and social class as Lowry, and who grew up in Washington D.C., I find it personally unbelievable that Lowry ever uses the n-word in general conversation or would slip up and say the n-word in that context. There is plenty of racism in our circles to be sure, and I can believe Lowry has all sorts of racial attitudes, but that's just not how racism is expressed in overeducated Gen X circles in 2024. The last time I heard any white person use the n-word in confidence among other whites in a serious non-ironic, non "look how contrarian I am" way was an older business owner in South Carolina about 20 years ago. Lowry may be a racist, but he is not a redneck, and I am sure aspires to be perceived as a Buckley not a Strom Thurmond.

  11. Carlana said,

    September 18, 2024 @ 8:14 am

    It’s obviously some kind of disfluency. The question is just what was the speech error. Was it just a random collection of syllables that happened to sound like the n-word, or was it a false start producing the n-word and then rolling it back? The random syllable theory would seem to require him to be trying to produce "immigrants" and "migrants" simultaneously and then repeating the N from "Haitian" instead of producing an M. It's not impossible, but it seems simpler to suggest he just produced the wrong word all together, perhaps because he was primed somehow. I agree with Seong that the kind of racist that Lowry is prides themselves on not saying the n-word directly, which is a marker of low class, but they can certainly think it! It's hard to believe that you can get something this clear just randomly without some degree of priming.

  12. Mark P said,

    September 18, 2024 @ 9:08 am

    Lowry might or might not have ever used the n word, but he also might have associated with people who are different from the genteel associates of others here. But we can say that he has a reputation such that reasonable people think he might be familiar with the term.

  13. Benjamin E. Orsatti said,

    September 18, 2024 @ 9:21 am

    I wonder what they're doing over at languagehat…

  14. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 18, 2024 @ 11:40 am

    I found the specific alleged NP (we can euphemistically call it "H****** N******") not only unusual statistically, as analyzed upthread, but sort of vaguely off-sounding – not really what I would expect as a fully idiomatic utterance these days among the Bigot-American Community, although perhaps my Sprachgefühl for that community's usage is not 100% accurate due to insufficient fieldwork. So I did a little poking around, and in addition to finding the NP in a poem of sorts apparently first published in the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1924 and then republished the following year in a respectable-at-the-time periodical, I found a perhaps-interesting instance here in a text supposedly from 2003: http://faculty.webster.edu/corbetre/haiti-archive-new/msg16517.html.

    It doesn't take too much careful reading to figure out that this is not an actual wire service news story but a hoax-or-parody (credited if you read carefully enough to the "Assassinated Press" rather than "Associated Press") purporting to show senior officials of the "Cheney/Bush" (sic) administration reveal their supposedly true racist motives for U.S. policy toward Haiti in crude and vulgar terms. The "Ralph Noriega" in whose mouth the NP is put is presumably supposed to be Roger Noriega, who held some similar-sounding State Department positions at around the same time.

    In any event, this is some modest evidence that regardless of whether actual right-of-center political personalities have ever used this NP in the current century, certain left-of-center types apparently like to fantasize that they do. (I'm sure, for both-sides-ism credit, that somewhere else out there on the internet is some badly-written right-wing hoax/parody of V.P. Harris and Gov. Walz talking to each other in crude and vulgar terms about their supposed plans to collectivize Midwestern agriculture and then liquidate the kulaks.)

  15. Lex said,

    September 18, 2024 @ 12:33 pm

    “ he might be familiar with the term.”

    There are people who are t familiar with it?

  16. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 18, 2024 @ 1:15 pm

    Due to deficiencies in my corpus linguistics methodology, I had earlier failed to think of investigating usage captured in the large corpus of lyrics from the Rap-American community collected at genius.com. When you tweak your orthography to suit the conventions of that community, both "Haitian nigga" and "Haitian niggas" turn up plenty of instances of use, which I expect the users would probably characterize as informal but not (because in-group etc etc) pejorative. I apparently have no reliable Sprachgefühl for current idiomaticity in this particular genre or discourse style, which may have undergone considerable evolution since the log-ago years when I was au courant with the then-latest releases by N.W.A. et al. I have no particular opinion on whether these uses are relevant context here, and no insight into whether Mr. Lowry is or isn't likely to have memorized the work of any of the recording artists in question.

  17. AG said,

    September 18, 2024 @ 8:08 pm

    It would be a much better world if newspapers got more attention by pointing out the well-established, substantial, near-constant, and undeniable racism and anti-immigrant fearmongering of hateful people like Lowry than by jumping on ambiguous moments like this. Oh well! Who can truly say what the polite fearmongering hate-peddler intended to say? We'll never know! He's usually polite, though! Shrug!

  18. Seong of Baekje said,

    September 18, 2024 @ 9:06 pm

    the well-established, substantial, near-constant, and undeniable racism and anti-immigrant fearmongering of hateful people like Lowry

    I'd love to know even one instance of undeniable racism from Lowry.

  19. Seth said,

    September 18, 2024 @ 9:59 pm

    I'd say Lowry's demeanor almost entirely rules out the possibility that he was starting to say a racial slur. If he was about to do that, I'd expect some sort of visible startle, as he realized he almost said a Very Taboo Word. Instead, I'd put it down to some sort of verbal stumble. Speaking clearly and smoothly on a live program can be difficult.

  20. AG said,

    September 19, 2024 @ 7:43 am

    @seong – Lowry has made it his mission to spread fear about the "border invasion" as well as working very hard to destroy affirmative action (see link). A non-racist might conceivably hold one of those views. Holding both means you're almost certainly a white supremacist (or at least want them to run the country, which means you're a de facto white supremacist). Not only holding both views but arranging it so that it is your job to spread those views makes you definitely a white supremacist. I suspect you'll disagree. That's fine with me.

    https://prescottenews.com/2024/04/13/opinion-yes-fight-anti-white-racism-rich-lowry/

  21. Peter Young said,

    September 19, 2024 @ 8:35 am

    Typical. You did not hear what you heard. Don’t believer your lying ears.

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