The varsity commentariat seems, for the most part, to have given up on the "Obama is a narcissist because pronouns" meme — we haven't heard this recently from George Will or Peggy Noonan or Charles Krauthammer or Stanley Fish. But it's alive and well among second- and third-string pundits, for example surfacing in Howard Portnoy's […]
Antonin Scalia and Bryan Garner have recently (June 19) published Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, a 608-page work in which, according to the publisher's blurb, "all the most important principles of constitutional, statutory, and contractual interpretation are systematically explained".
Our posts about political language are usually reactions to things that politicians say, or things that pundits say about politicians. But this one is about something that mainstream pundits are not saying. Or more precisely, no longer saying very often. The "President Me, Myself and I" meme — the false idea that Barack Obama uses […]
Stanley Fish asks ("Mind Your P’s and B’s: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation", NYT 1/23/2011): [H]ow do the technologies wielded by digital humanities practitioners either facilitate the work of the humanities, as it has been traditionally understood, or bring about an entirely new conception of what work in the humanities can and should be? After […]
I've been reading Stanley Fish's recent booklet "How to Write a Sentence: And How To Read One", seduced by passages like this one on page 2: … just piling up words, one after the other, won't do much of anything until something else has been added. That something is named quite precisely by Anthony Burgess […]
Yesterday, Marc Cenedella did a sort of Breakfast Experiment™, and reported the results in "I, Obama: The President and the personal pronoun": President Obama has taken criticism in some sectors for his use of the personal pronoun in describing, and applauding, the nation’s success in covert operations. So I’ve spent my Saturday morning at the […]
I've generally been skeptical of claims about counts of first-person singular pronouns as an index of self-involvement, mainly on empirical grounds. In particular, the pundits who beat this drum mostly make assertions without any counts, much less comparisons of counts. For some of the Language Log coverage, with links to articles by George F. Will, […]
It's no longer just imperial pontificators like George F. Will and Stanley Fish. The Obama-is-a-narcissist-and-his-use-of-I-proves-it meme has spread like kudzu, wrapping itself around the brainstem of every Fox News sub-editor and provincial pundit in the land. You couldn't kill it with a blowtorch. Fox News, specifically, has decided to count first-person pronouns in every speech […]
Fans of "word rage" may be interested in the collection of responses that Stanley Fish got to his call for "phrases and announcements that make your heart sink and make you want to commit mayhem" ("And the Winner: 'No Problem'", 11/23/2009). The resulting collection is a bit different from the usual exercise in meta-linguistic naming […]
Not, that is, unless you think that typical contemporary exponents of this linguistic register are Dick Cavett, Glamour Magazine, and Michael Bérubé. I noted this morning that Scott Adams is far from the only one to suggest that "at the end of the day" (in the meaning "when all is said and done" or "in […]
Over the past couple of months, there's been a surge of media interest in various politicians' pronoun use. For some of the Language Log coverage, with links to articles by George F. Will, Stanley Fish, and Peggy Noonan (among others), see "Fact-checking George F. Will" (6/7/2009); "Obama's Imperial 'I': spreading the meme" (6/8/2009); "Inaugural pronouns" […]
Last month, it was Barack Obama whose (allegedly) imperial ego was said to be signaled by (fictitious) overuse of first-person singular pronouns. (Follow the link for discussion of columns on the topic by Terence Jeffrey, George F. Will, Stanley Fish, and Mary Kate Cary.) A few days ago, Peggy Noonan's devastating attack on Sarah Palin […]
Mary Kate Cary ("Barack Obama Journeys From 'Yes We Can' to the Imperial 'I'", U.S. News and World Report, 6/9/2009) joins the media chorus: "The Great I Am." That's what Dorothy Walker Bush, the matriarch of the Bush family, used to call it when one of her children used too many "I's" in a sentence. […]