I agree with Mark that James Wood's condescending comments about Palin's use of verbage are pure de-haut-en-bushwa. On the other hand, let's not delude ourselves about this item. Palin's verbage is not simply a term for "language" or "wording" that has been happily circulating in vernacular speech since it was first attested 200 years ago, […]
In the Oct. 13 New Yorker, James Wood commented at length on Sarah Palin's pronunciation of verbiage in her interview with Sean Hannity ("Verbage: The Republican War on Words"), closing with this paragraph: Hearing her being interviewed by Sean Hannity, on Fox News, almost made one wish for a Republican victory in November, so that […]
[This is really a comment on a comment on one of our recent posts about the sociopolitics of g-dropping — I've set it up as a separate post because it's too long to fit gracefully in the comments section.]
In a recent exchange ("Pinker on Palin's 'nucular'", 10/5/2008; "Pinker contra Nunberg re nuclear/nucular", 10/17/2008; "Nucular riposte", 10/18/2008), Steven Pinker and Geoffrey Nunberg disagreed, among other things, about whether President George W. Bush is engaging in "conscious linguistic slumming" when he uses the pronunciation commonly written as "nucular". Geoff argued that George Bush … can't […]
[This is a guest post by Steven Pinker of Harvard University. —GKP] I agree with Geoff Nunberg that the nucular pronunciation is not the result of a phonetic process that applies across the board in these dialects. It's a lexical phenomenon, though one with a phonetic motivation, and I didn't distinguish the two in my […]
Will Pavia at the Times, discussing the recent Loebner Prize event ("Machine takes on man at mass Turing Test", 10/13/2008), explains how he figured out which of his two interlocutors was human: The other correspondent was undoubtedly a robot. I asked it for its opinion on Sarah Palin, and it replied: ‘Sorry, don’t know her.’ […]
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 […]
Two recent sightings of superlative swingest 'most powerful in swinging an election'. From The Field on 3 October, about the state of Ohio: And so it is a turnout war, plain and simple, in this swingest of swing states with a whopping 20 Electoral Votes. And from the Daily Show on 7 October, in a […]
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Eager as always to score high-school snark points, Maureen Dowd wrote today about Sarah Palin ("Sarah's Pompom Palaver", 10/5/2008): Then she uttered yet another sentence that defies diagramming: “It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are […]
This is a follow-up to Mark's post earlier today on affective demonstratives, though I am going to move us even further than he did from Palin and towards the lexical/constructional pragmatics. The overall picture is this: this NOUN reliably signals that the speaker is in a heightened emotional state (or at least intends to convey […]
We can fairly be accused of spending too much time recently on the subject of how Sarah Palin talks, though in this respect, Language Log is simply reflecting the level of popular interest represented by the millions watching her clips on YouTube. This post also pivots (to use a couple of her special words) off […]
One of the things that marks Sarah Palin as a linguistic outsider is her use of also. In part, this is just a matter of frequency. In her contribution to last night's vice-presidential debate, she used the word also 48 times in about 7600 words, accounting for about 0.63% of her words. Her opponent, Joe […]
OK, I'm going to give it a shot — I'm going to make a comment about language use by some politicians while giving Language Log readers what they come here for: "discussion of language by real live linguists". After the vice-presidential debate last night, I was pleased not to have heard Gov. Sarah Palin repeat […]