Mitt Romney sometimes exhibits a rapid repetition of phrase-initial function words, often intermixed with um and uh. This behavior was especially frequent in the third presidential debate (10/22/2012). Here's an example from the beginning of his first response: Your browser does not support the audio element. um uh this is obviously an area of great concern […]
I need to apologize for causing some confusion. My recent posts on journalistic quotation practices ("Jonah Lehrer, Bob Dylan, and journalistic unquotations", 8/3/2012; "More unquotations from the New Yorker", 8/4/2012) dealt with two issues at once: journalistic carelessness and journalistic deceit. And some readers seem to have concluded that I meant to treat all carelessness […]
I was shocked to read that Jonah Lehrer had quit his job at the New Yorker, after admitting that he fabricated some quotations from Bob Dylan in his recent book Imagine: How Creativity Works. I was shocked because what Lehrer did is consistent with the standard behavior of journalists, though perhaps not with the official […]
Modern mass media expose us to a lot of political speech, and therefore to a lot of journalistic commentary on politicians' individual speaking styles. Regular readers know that I don't generally have a lot of sympathy for attempts to tag Politician X with his or her allegedly characteristic X-isms, whether it's the collections of Bushisms […]
I just had a terrible idea that could probably make someone a modest fortune. I was inspired by Erin Gloria Ryan, "My Love Affair With 'Like'", Jezebel 6/26/2011: I use the word "like" with embarrassing frequency. I've started paying attention to how other people talk as well, and it's amazing how many women who I […]
Tim Leonard sent along the Nov. 2 User Friendly strip, with a question:
Commenting on the fact that the overall speaking rate in JFK's inaugural address was 96.5 words per minute, the second slowest in the past 60 years ("Inaugural Speed", 9/14/2010), Terry Collmann noted that that Kennedy had the reputation of being a fast talker, with his inaugural address specifically cited by one authority: Certainly his Inauguration […]
Here's a mystery for you. Last summer, the weekly radio show Studio 360 recorded an episode at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The show, which originally aired on 7/17/2009 and ran again yesterday, included a segment about the list of things that members of They Might be Giants "are not allowed to say within the band".
Over at the Brainstorm blog ("Psychology Today Editors Flood the Blog Zone"), Matthew Hutson asks "What does Caroline Kennedy know that we don't?" This is about Caroline Kennedy's filled pauses, of course, but what struck me first about Matt's post is the way that the blog format allows a journalist to take a more personal […]
As a public figure, you're in trouble when the media are less interested in what you have to say than in how you say it. This is now the sad situation of Caroline Kennedy, whose filled pauses seem to be getting more press than any other aspect of her bid for Hillary Clinton's senate seat. […]
Yesterday, LizardBreath at Unfogged made an excellent point in response to my recent post about Sarah Palin's (in)coherence ("I Think There's A Problem With the Methodology Here", 11/19/2008): If even the clearest speakers' speech often looks incoherent when transcribed, then this argument establishes that no one can ever be validly criticized as an unusually incoherent […]
The general reaction to Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric has been a sort of displaced embarrassment. I thought that Timothy Burke expressed it well ("Trade Secret of Teachers", 9/25/2008): Bluffing at knowledge is kind of like a bad pick-up line in a bar: it may be amusing, it’s usually off-putting, and most importantly, it’s […]