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.
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.”
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
Scott P. said,
September 17, 2024 @ 8:32 am
Charles, your prior probabilities should reflect that Lowry is a massive racist.
Pierre Delecto said,
September 17, 2024 @ 9:02 am
The video clearly shows Lowery starting with an "M." Time to move on.
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?
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?
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:
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.