From President-elect Obama's latest weekly YouTube Address: I know that passing this plan won't be easy. I will need, and seek, support from Republicans and Democrats; and I'll be welcome to ideas and suggestions from both sides of the aisle. (emphasis added) This sounds to me like an amalgam of 1. … ideas and suggestions […]
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 […]
There was rather an unfortunate fracas in the sherry lounge at Language Log Plaza yesterday. Liberman was still throwing his weight around with evidence that attacks on Palin's language are mostly ill-informed linguistic snobbery, when Pullum, who is much better informed than most snobs, pulled the rug out from under his feet. Now, at last, we can […]
Mark struggles to maintain some sort of balance to counter the amateur linguistics we see in the press concerning the language used by political figures, even to the extent of trying to defend Sarah Palin's often incoherent public pronouncements. But I think she'll continue to outflank him. Here's a recent quote, from the Larry King […]
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Dick Cavett recently called Sarah Palin "The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla" and "the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High". He worries that "ambitious politicos" will learn "that frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences that ramble on long after thought has given out completely are a candidate’s valuable traits". Peter Suderman, more specific if less witty, […]
It's time once again for our semi-regular feature, "Mr. Payack Bamboozles the Media." Paul J.J. Payack, as Language Log readers know, is the assiduously self-promoting president of the Global Language Monitor who has managed to hoodwink unsuspecting journalists on a range of pseudoscientific claims, most notably the number of words in the English language. (He […]
I was interested in this comment by BeachSaint on Matt Yglesias' post "Duberstein for Obama": Someone should check the seismic activity in the Simi Valley between now and election day because Ronald Reagan must be rolling over in his grave over the antics of the McCain Campaign. I am a registered Republican who has received […]
My latest email from johnmccain.com, sent at 10:18 this evening, starts with four typos in two lines: (Click on the image for a larger version)
I agree with Politico's John Harris and Jim Vanderhei that the charges of media bias against the McCain campaign are exaggerated. On the other hand, no one ever went broke overestimating the media's capacity for offhand condescension, as witness these excerpts from the transcript that ABC published of Elizabeth Vargas' interview with Sarah Palin: ELIZABETH […]
[Update 10/29/2008 2:20 p.m.: A bunch of hits from freerepublic.com and similar sites suggest that Rush Limbaugh picked this story up, apparently in a credulous way, on his show today. I believe that he referenced the AAPS site, not this one, but people are finding their way here via web search. So for any internet […]
According to Ben Smith ("Palin allies report rising campaign tension", Politico, 10/25/2008): Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said […]
No, not about whether "professional linguists, almost universally, do not believe that any naturally occurring changes in the language can be bad". More on that later. Nor was I wrong about James Wood's sneer at Sarah Palin's "verbage". No more on that is needed.
Louis Menand ("Thumbspeak", The New Yorker, 10/20/2008) aims a gibe at my profession: [P]rofessional linguists, almost universally, do not believe that any naturally occurring changes in the language can be bad. As a representative of the species, I can testify that this is false. Rather, we believe that moral and aesthetic judgments about language should […]