My fellow prisoners

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Michael Erard, who wrote the book about speech errors ("Um"), discusses the latest slip of the tongue to make political news. We've previously commented on John McCain's substitution of Iraq for Iran, Barack Obama's substitution of president for vice-president, David Kurtz's substitution of Republican for Democratic, and Jo Ann Davidson's substitution of Sarah Pawlenty for Sarah Palin.

I agree with most of Michael's analysis:

The linguistic answer is that he swapped one stock phrase for another ("my fellow prisoners" for "my fellow Americans/citizens"). […]

But why the slip? Immediately, you can see he's distracted. But overall, it means that he's running on automatic, and not really monitoring his speech as he should be.

I'm less convinced by his next step (which he puts forward clearly as speculation):

He's tired, but he's also thrown in the towel. His heart isn't it. It's not that he's losing his mind; he's lost his heart. That's what I think this means. All this is speculation, though. The real evidence would come from an overall increase in slips of the same type. Anyone want to provide it?

Pending such evidence, this seems to me to be just one more slip of the tongue, a substitution of the type that political campaigning tends to foster.

But Michael might be right. I've presented some evidence on both sides of a similar question with respect to President George W. Bush ("Has George W. Bush become more disfluent?", 11/17/2005; "Trends in presidential disfluency", 11/26/2005).

So I'll observe again, as I did a couple of weeks ago, that our political discourse calls out for better quantitative metrics of babble-ology. Or perhaps a focus on content rather than on form?



9 Comments

  1. Lee Kinkade said,

    October 9, 2008 @ 9:49 am

    When I first heard this, I assumed that he was making some kind of Rush Limbaugh-like reference to being held captive by a liberal congress and press that he and his supporters profoundly disagreed with.

  2. Michael W. said,

    October 9, 2008 @ 12:34 pm

    I thought this might have been a quick response to the recent "confusion" of Joe Biden and John McCain. In one, he was called "John Biden". Another person said "the next Vice President of the United States, John McCain". Interestingly in the second case, the person who said it (Jim Piccillo) didn't realize it until well afterwards.

    I suppose it's obligatory to make an outlandish psychological observation based on the incidents. In this case, it must be because all white men running for top office look alike.

    "John Biden"
    http://www.tampabays10.com/news/columnist/story.aspx?storyid=91680&catid=79

    Biden introduced as McCain
    http://cbs4denver.com/watercooler/biden.introduced.mccain.2.836329.html

  3. Josh Millard said,

    October 9, 2008 @ 1:16 pm

    When I first heard this, I assumed that he was making some kind of Rush Limbaugh-like reference to being held captive by a liberal congress and press that he and his supporters profoundly disagreed with.

    Which would be a weird but plausible piece of rhetoric if it was supported by context, yeah. But that's the kind of line you have to clearly and carefully set up — you'd build a speech around it, not just drop it into the middle of a thought to fend for itself.

  4. Ann said,

    October 9, 2008 @ 3:17 pm

    I discounted this as a slip of the tongue also, but I'm surprised to see "my fellow prisoners" described as a stock phrase. Are speeches by prisoners to groups of other prisoners a common phenomenon? Did McCain give speeches to fellow POWs during his captivity?

  5. Jeremy said,

    October 9, 2008 @ 5:53 pm

    Ann, my thought too. "Fellow prisoners" is fairly stock, but in the third person ("his fellow prisoners"); first person would be fairly rare unless you're trying to incite a riot or something.

    Perhaps in this case McCain was thinking about making another POW reference, and it slipped through that way. In the video of the speech, you can see McCain has a slight pause after the phrase, as if he's not quite sure whether he's mis-spoken or not, or whether he should correct himself before going on. In the end he leaves it uncorrected, which is probably the best way to not draw attention to it, as if that were possible at this point.

  6. Carl said,

    October 10, 2008 @ 1:11 am

    "My fellow prisoners" wouldn't have to be a common address to be a stock phrase. I don't know how frequently it's been used in McCain's speeches, but a quick glance at Google shows it was in his acceptance of the Republican nomination, at least: "If I went home, they would use it as propaganda to demoralize my fellow prisoners."

  7. Busyhands said,

    October 10, 2008 @ 1:11 am

    I surmise that it's simply exhaustion. George W Bush is certainly capable of stringing together a coherent sentence on a somewhat complex topic – I've seen a film of him addressing a group of fat cats on the topic of the economy and he looked positively presidential – but these moments have become vanishingly scarce as time has worn on. I think the weight of the office, and perhaps the realization of the scope of his screw-ups, has simply worn him out.

    Meanwhile, the candidates are under extreme pressure and probably running on four or five hours of sleep a day. That will certainly distract a person, and will inevitably lead to some interesting utterances.

    That's my story, and I'm stickin' it to ya. Or something.

  8. David Marjanović said,

    October 11, 2008 @ 3:20 pm

    I think the weight of the office, and perhaps the realization of the scope of his screw-ups, has simply worn him out.

    It also seems to depend on whether he's drunk.

    (Sure, he says he gave up drinking, but what little evidence there is suggests otherwise.)

  9. Sili said,

    October 12, 2008 @ 8:46 am

    I agree that "My fellow prisoners" doesn't work as a form of address, but I can well imagine that it's a common enough collocation for McCain to use in reference, that the substitution won't be all that farfetched for him.

    It would have been harder to explain coming from Bush or, say, Kerry, who wasn't imprisoned. He, though, might have said "my fellow soldiers" or some such.

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