A Roguish Chrestomathy

What Sayers said

2009-07-19T21:12:45Z

Anyone who has paid much attention to the Language Log’s occasional examinations of prescriptivism and style manuals and such will have noticed a few truisms that come up again and again:

People who write very well sometimes say silly things when they try to advise others on how to write well.
People who give advice on writing do not always follow it.
Geoff Pullum hates The Elements of Style with the sort of passionate fury ordinary people tend to reserve for terrorists, dictators, and members of rival sports teams.

I have nothing to add to the discussion on point three. I do, however, want to share some further evidence touching on points one and two, from one of my favourite authors.

Dorothy L. Sayers was, of course, the author of some of the most beautifully written detective fiction in the English language. Less famously, though, she was also the author of a remarkable collection of essays called Unpopular Opinions, published in 1946. The book is divided into three sections: Theological, Political, and Critical. The Critical section consists entirely of mock-serious “Studies in Sherlock Holmes,” which are essential reading for anyone interested in the early history of the territory now known as Fandom. The Political section includes the classic feminist essay “Are Women Human?” (a question that was taken up many years later by Catharine MacKinnon). But the essay I’d like to look at here is “The English Language,” which, perhaps tellingly, appears in the Political section as well.

“The English Language” is a remarkable mix of good sound sense, silly nonsense, and appalling jingoism. Sayers, as one might expect, is too well-informed to fall for certain familiar forms of prescriptivist poppycock:

There are pedants, God mend their ears, who, having read some cheap-jack, rule-of-thumb, cramp-wit folly in a sixpenny text-book,¹ would like to break our free idiom to the bit of an alien fashion. These are not the Latinists (who know better), but the Latinisers; they remember the Latin bones of language, and will have them dry bones. These are the pinching misers, who will hoard their gold, but will not put it out to gain. Of such are the dreary little men who write to the papers protesting—in the teeth of Chaucer, Bacon, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, the English Bible, Milton, Burton, Congreve, Swift, Burke, Peacock, Ruskin, Arnold and the whole tradition of English letters—that a sentence must not end with a preposition. This is no matter of syntax; it is a matter of idiom; and the freedom to handle our prepositions is among the most glorious in our charter of liberties.

Sayers is presumably not alluding here to the Magna Carta Libertatum, which was, after all, written in Latin; perhaps there's something about prepositions in the English Bill of Rights (1689). In any case, one can sense a strong nationalist undercurrent here. A couple of pages earlier, Sayers’s nationalism is no mere undercurrent:

It is well, then, to know what we mean and to learn how to say it in English. And by English I mean English, and not any other tongue. In a day when the British Broadcasting Corporation imports its language committee from Ireland and Scotland, and when Fleet Street swarms with Scots, Irish, and Americans, it is well to remember that all these persons are foreigners; that the Scots and the Irish were so from the beginning and that the Americans have become so; that they speak our language as foreigners; and that while it is childlike and charming in us to enjoy their sing-song speech and their quaint foreign barbarisms, to imitate these things is childishness and folly.

Sayers does not mention Canadians at all; perhaps she felt that they had not yet become foreigners as the Americans had. The Welsh are another interesting omission. And I really don’t know precisely what she means when she says that the Americans (et al.) “speak our language as foreigners.” Did she think that the American language had become a separate language from the English language? But under that view, surely Americans don’t generally go around speaking English as a foreign language; they speak American as their native language, with all its “quaint foreign barbarisms.”

In addition to her prejudices, Sayers had her peeves. She insists, adamantly and at length, on the semantic distinction between will and shall, and laments that “Even so correct and elegant a writer as Mr. Robert Graves is losing his English ear and writing: ‘I would like to,’ and ‘I would prefer to.’” (Her forcefulness on this point is perhaps that of a committed partisan fighting a hopeless battle.) I confess to having felt a certain thrill when I learned that Sayers shared one of my peeves; she objects to the expression meteoric rise on the grounds that “a meteor cannot rise, and in fact is a meteor only in virtue of its fall.” (I think I’m entitled to this peeve; after all, I don’t claim that meteoric rise is bad grammar, but only that it is bad astronomy, as well as a cliché.)

Sayers also inveighs against “that vile fellow the hanging participle, who, if he would but hang all his employers, would perform the one useful act of his mean existence.” She offers us the following example, together with her perhaps hyperbolically bewildered reaction to it:

“And though one might avoid the margins his lobby was too tiny not to step on the paint when crossing it.”

Who stepped on the paint? The lobby? Who crossed? The lobby? Crossed what? Did the lobby, in an access of religious fervour, cross itself?²

The thing is, I don’t think this really is an example of a hanging participle at all. Sayers purports to be confused first about the subject of to step, which is an infinitive, not a participle, and then about the subject of crossing, which is a participle, but not a hanging one. The participial clause when crossing it is correctly attached to the clause it modifies, namely not to step on the paint, and the two clauses are naturally interpreted as having the same subject. Who that subject may be is perhaps less obvious, but it is clearly intended to be the arbitrary or generic null subject (called PRO_arb in some modern theoretical syntactic frameworks), which is more or less equivalent to the generic pronoun one, as in Sayers's proposed rewording: “the lobby, being small, had been painted all over, so that one could not cross it without stepping on the paint.” I grant that the original sentence is an ungainly one, but it is not well chosen as an illustration of “that vile fellow the hanging participle.”

I have a better example for you. This is from page 115 of a mystery novel called The Five Red Herrings, by one of my favourite authors:

Being, however, of the female sex, the prohibition immediately aroused in her a strong spirit of inquiry [...].

Who was of the female sex? The prohibition?

To be entirely fair, the sentence quoted above is not directly attributable to the author herself, or even to her eloquent omniscient narrator; it is part of a speech made by Mervyn Bunter to his employer, Lord Peter Wimsey. Sayers certainly did, on occasion, deliberately put malapropisms into the mouths of her characters (especially if they were meant to be Scottish, Irish, or American), but Bunter is always the epitome of the gentleman’s gentleman, and I doubt that she would play such a trick on him. Furthermore, I cannot believe that if Sayers had intentionally made Bunter hang this participle, she would have allowed it to pass unremarked by both Lord Peter and the narrator.

Finally, as long as we are taking pot-shots at the nodding Homer, I may as well show you this charming example of overnegation, from page 115 of Have His Carcase:³

No theory is too silly to be dismissed without investigation.

Words to live by!

1. Does this turn of phrase remind you of anyone?

2. In case you were wondering, the word access here is not an error (on Sayers's part or mine) for excess; rather, Sayers used it in the sense given by the OED as “11. An outburst; a sudden fit of anger or other passion. (Modern, after Fr. accès.)”

3. Sayers evidently had particular trouble with hundred-and-fifteenth pages.

Humpty Dumpty is alive and well...

2009-06-28T16:54:45Z

Statue of Humpty Dumpty by Kimber Fiebiger in Mesa, AZ

...and writing for the Toronto Star under the pseudonym Bob Martin:

There will be many detractors heckling you from the road side as you plod your way to Broadway. Allow yourself the satisfaction of proving them wrong. The best way to do this is by winning a brace of Tony awards. One Tony might be given out of pity, or two because the show got lucky in certain categories, but winning a brace of Tonys is an unequivocal statement of success and should be celebrated as such.

I define a "brace" as more than four.

That's a great deal to make one word mean; to be precise, it's more than twice as much as the word brace means for the rest of us poor slobs. It must be fun to be Bob Martin—imagine reading, in some old novel or other, about two gentlemen fighting a duel with a brace of pistols, and trying to picture how they managed to hold them all. And what a feast a brace of pheasants would make!

Impenetrability! That's what I say.

Let us sit upon the ground...

2009-06-28T16:15:33Z

...and tell sad stories about the King of Pop. That's certainly what CBC Radio's been doing for the past couple of days, anyway. (Word is they no longer have funding for chairs over there.)

Oddly enough, I, too, have a sad story about Michael Jackson to tell. I've never been interested in the type of music he made, and I didn't pay particular attention to the disturbing tales of his personal conduct, so it's not really a story about the man himself, and it's not a long story, but I think it's worth telling.

When I was in high school, I rode the school bus every day; my school was too far away to walk to, and I never did learn to drive (and even if I had, the family car would have been needed elsewhere anyway). The bus driver was a black woman named Terri (or Terry, or Teri—it feels odd that I don't know how to spell her name, but I never did have occasion to see it written down). Although she was a parent, she was not very much older than her high-school passengers, and she would chat with those of us who were sitting near the front of the bus; I didn't say much, but I enjoyed listening, and felt a pleasant and unexpected sense of continuity between high school and adulthood in these conversations. Anyway, Terri would sometimes tell us about her young son, and once or twice even brought him on board with her. One time, she told us about something he had said about his aspirations for the future: "When I grow up," he had announced, "I want to be white, like Michael Jackson."

I'm not going to blither about Role Models here, and I neither know nor care whether Jackson's gradual albinification was the result of vitiligo or cosmetic procedures or some combination of the two. I'm also not going to pontificate about the cultural significance and biological arbitrariness of racial categories; there are many interesting things to be said about them that I'm really not well equipped to say. But this story is the one thing I will always remember about Michael Jackson, even if it's not exactly about him.

Political advertising

2009-05-17T01:36:02Z

View Poll: #1401069

Amazonfail II: The conspiracy against Wodehouse

2009-04-27T01:52:18Z

A few of you may recall from a couple of weeks ago a certain brouhaha, a bit of a to-do, about how Amazon.com suddenly failed to display various works related to lesbians and gays in search results. One of the big questions, of course, was whether it would be plausible as well as charitable to attribute this "glitch" to incompetence rather than malice (albeit incompetence nudged in one particular direction by general societal levels of homophobia).

I have no original ideas to contribute to the debate, but I thought I'd share, belatedly, one piece of circumstantial evidence that may or may not reflect on the plausibility of the incompetence hypothesis. I was recently searching on Amazon for P. G. Wodehouse's memoir Over Seventy, which, alas, appears to be out of print. Amazon does have a page for Over Seventy, with links to people selling used copies starting from usd$202.76 (too rich for my blood). In order to help its customers find what they are looking for, Amazon invites browsers to supply products with informative tags. No one has yet tagged Over Seventy, but that's okay, because Amazon's software has helpfully come up with some speculation under the heading "Suggested Tags from Similar Products." Here are some of the tags it thinks may apply to this work of autobiography by the creator of Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves:

dystopia
african literature
post-apocalyptic
chick lit

I am not sure who is more likely to be disappointed here, aficionados of Wodehouse or fans of dystopian post-apocalyptic African chick-lit.

Abhorrent laws

2009-04-05T22:06:39Z

"Abhorrent" is the word that President Barack Obama used to describe the new Afghan law that denies women certain extremely basic rights, such as the right to leave their houses on a whim, or the right to decline to have sex with their husbands. This law would, in effect, place all Afghan women under a particularly malign form of house arrest in which their captors would be permitted to rape them with impunity.

I have to agree with Obama here; abhorrent is definitely the word for it. And while we're on the subject of abhorrent laws, it is perhaps worth noting that in many states in Obama's own country, spousal rape has been outlawed only quite recently—1993 in the case of North Carolina, to take one example. Even now that spousal rape is illegal throughout the United States, it is still the case in many states that a woman who has been sexually assaulted by her husband has less recourse to legal protection than one who has been assaulted by a stranger. In some cases, the period during which such an assault can be reported is shorter; in some, a narrower range of unwanted sexual contact is prohibited; in some, the standard for demonstrating that force was used is stricter.

I think that this, too, is abhorrent. I suppose the idea behind these laws is that a husband has some cause to expect that his wife will consent to have sex with him—but then surely a wife has some right to expect that her husband will not assault her, and isn't this a rather more important right? And, of course, these laws are different from the Afghan law in their gender-neutral reference to spouses—in general, they give a wife just as much latitude to sexually assault her husband as they give him to assault her. But this is not, I think, the sort of equality that does anyone any good.

Abhorrent is the only word for it. I hope that with all the moral outrage going around, there's enough there to fix more than just the Afghan law.

Fishwrap d'avril

2009-04-01T19:56:26Z

It is an ancient and noble tradition, among certain newspapers, to mark the first day of April by sneaking a fanciful work of fiction into their otherwise reliable pages. One of my favourite examples of the genre is the Guardian's classic 1977 article on the island nation of San Seriffe (comprising the islands of Upper and Lower Caisse, and ruled by the dictatorial General Pica).

But what do you do if you're in the satire business, and such spoof articles are your regular stock in trade? Well, if you're The Onion, what you do is put together an April Fool's Day issue that consists entirely of sober, factual reporting about the real events of the day. It's quite impressive, really—not just as a brilliant meta-prank, but as actual journalism. If The Onion did this every day, we wouldn't need the New York Times.

That's quite all right; I'm used to it

2009-03-26T14:54:58Z

Farhad Manjoo, reviewing some new Web browsers in the New York Times, has the following to say about the latest version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer:

It's speedy, it seems inured to crashes, and not only does it match its rivals' features — in some cases, I.E. beats them.

I suppose it would be inured to crashes by now; the question is, should the user adopt the same attitude? Or might the user, perhaps, be justified in having somewhat higher expectations?

The online Times, by the way, has a handy new feature that allows one to look up any word that appears in it; selecting a word brings up a little question mark icon that, when clicked, opens the American Hertitage Dictionary's definition. Here's what you get when you look up inure:

To habituate to something undesirable, especially by prolonged subjection; accustom: "Though the food became no more palatable, he soon became sufficiently inured to it" (John Barth).

A headlong plunging year

2008-12-21T03:01:30Z

Since I intend to get on a plane tomorrow, I thought I'd see what my daily newspaper (online edition) had to say about what the weather has in store for us, which turned out to include the following sentence:

There are just 11 days left in 2008, but the most precipitous year on record is far from over.

I'm not sure I would—or could—have used "most precipitous" to mean 'having the most precipitation'; on the other hand, I can't think of a good concise alternative, either. ("Wettest" springs to mind, but that might be taken as referring only to rain, rather than to rain and snow and sleet and hail and whatever else has been dropping out of the sky on us over the last twelve months.)

Update: They've changed "most precipitous" to "soggiest."

History is made

2008-11-05T04:16:03Z

I've been listening to CBC Radio 1 and watching the returns on the New York Times' Web site. The radio just said that Obama is now officially believed to have won, and played some audio of cheering crowds in Chicago... and then as I listened, I realized that not all the cheers were coming from the radio. People are cheering in the streets here in Toronto.

Another reminder

2008-11-04T22:30:36Z

If you are a citizen of the United States of America, you have a little time left to...

VOTE.

Me, I mailed in my absentee ballot on October 14—the same day as the Canadian federal election. This time around, I voted with a great deal of hope and enthusiasm, especially compared to the grim determination of four years ago. This time, I think my vote will make a difference: the race is close in the state where my ballot will be counted. This time, I think my candidate has a better chance of winning. (The Comic Strip of Record has already called the election in his favour.) This time, my candidate is actually... inspiring. Barack Obama is not just the better choice; he's a really good choice. He's smart and thoughtful and principled. He both gives and commands respect. He will remind people in the United States that their government works for them, and he will remind people in other countries that the United States can be a good ally. He is part of the fulfillment of the dream of the civil rights movement. I know he won't be perfect, and he'll probably do a few things I won't agree with, but I think he's the best presidential candidate I've ever voted for, and I really hope he wins.

A reminder

2008-10-14T12:58:09Z

If you're Canadian, this would be a good time to…

VOTE.

Stop spamming me, René.

2008-10-12T16:32:40Z

A message with the following subject line showed up in two of my inboxen this morning:

FELICITATION VOUS AVEZ GAGNE LA SOMME DE 150.000 EURO (ceci n'est pas un spam)

Now, I would really prefer it if René Magritte would stop sending me this kind of message altogether. L'Office québécois de la langue française, on the other hand, would simply like him to use their 1997 coinage pourriel instead of the English spam. Pourriel has the distinction of being a blend (mot-valise, or portmanteau word, sensu Dumpty) formed from another blend: pourriel is a blend of poubelle and courriel, the latter being itself a contracted form of courrier électronique. The OQLF further instructs us, in the relevant entries in the Grand dictionnaire terminologique, that courriel, unlike électronique, is to be spelled with no acute accent on the e (because French words just aren't supposed to end in -iél, you see), and that the source of pourriel is poubelle, not pourri or pourriture, "comme certains le laissent croire." Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Some latitude for interpretation

2008-09-16T01:38:13Z

A newsreader on CBC Radio One has just seen fit to reassure us that, despite today's worrisome financial developments in the States, things look rather better "north of the forty-ninth parallel." This is not terribly comforting if you consider that the TSX is somewhere around 43º, and the Bourse de Montréal circa 45º.

Linguistic history is made in Islamabad (and New York)

2008-09-07T21:17:38Z

The world has come a long way in the past third of a century or so. In 1975, Robin Lakoff's book Language and Women's Place had the following to say about widows and widowers:

Surely a bereaved husband and a bereaved wife are equivalent: they have both undergone the loss of a mate. But in fact, linguistically at any rate, this is not true. It is true that we have two words, widow and widower; but here again, widow is far commoner in use. Widows, not widowers, have their particular roles in folklore and tradition, and mourning behavior of particular sorts seems to be expected more strongly, and for a longer time, of a widow than of a widower. But there is more than this, as evidenced by the following:

Mary is John's widow.

*John is Mary's widower.

Like mistress, widow commonly occurs with a possessive preceding it, the name of the woman's late husband. Though he is dead, she is still defined by her relationship to him. But the bereaved husband is no longer defined in terms of his wife. While she is alive, he is sometimes defined as Mary's husband (though less often, probably, than she is as "John's wife"). But once she is gone, her function for him is over, linguistically speaking anyway.

As of this morning (at the latest), this is no longer true. Here is today's New York Times reporting on yesterday's election in Pakistan:

Bhutto’s Widower, Viewed as Ally by U.S., Wins the Pakistani Presidency Handily

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of the assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto who has little experience in governing, was elected president of Pakistan on Saturday by a wide margin.

We talk about "sexist language," but, as Lakoff's book made clear, it's not really the language that is at fault. The sexist asymmetries in our language merely reflect, and to some extent reinforce, the sexism that is present in our society. (The words governor and governess, for example, were once about as parallel semantically as they are morphologically; that they have drifted apart is merely a reflection of the fact that society generally assigned men to govern states, and women to govern children. This pair, I think, is unlikely to swing back into sync; Sarah Palin is not the governess of Alaska.)

Zardari is described as "Bhutto's widower" for the same reason that so many women over the centuries have been described as somebody's widow: because the deceased spouse is more prominent in the speaker's mind than the surviving one. All it took to make the construction in Lakoff's (24b) grammatical was the remarkable career of Benazir Bhutto. If we want to change the language, all we have to do is change the world.

Lynn Johnston ≠ Dalton Camp

2008-08-15T19:00:36Z

Sherry Stern, writing in the Los Angeles Times, and reprinted in my morning paper, tells us:

The creator of the popular comic strip For Better or for Worse has had a change of heart — literally and figuratively — and won't be retiring after all.

As it turns out, "literally and figuratively" seems to mean something more like "in two slightly different figurative senses"; Johnston's decision not to retire was prompted by a change in her personal life, not by a heart transplant. Now, I have, in a previous post, sketched a possible defence for the use of the word literally as a mere intensifier (not that I would ever use it that way myself, mind you). However, I don't think you can get away with using this bleached sense of literally if you are also conjoining (and contrasting) it with figuratively.

In any case, I don't think the intensifying meaning of literally was what Stern had in mind. The idea seems to be that Johnston had a change of heart (in the ordinary idiomatic sense of the phrase) about retiring after undergoing a change in a matter of the heart (in another conventional figurative sense of heart), namely the end of her marriage. But it's not at all obvious to me which one Stern thought of as literal.

An ambiguous brand name

2008-08-15T04:16:38Z

Is it soap? Or is it a phone sex line?

Answer: It is a body wash. I saw it in a grocery store recently. Further research indicates that it comes packaged with a rather histrionic brand of masculinity. The Web site for the product (which is Flash-based, and which I decline to link to) proclaims that it is maintenance for your mansuit™. (I am not entirely sure what a mansuit™ is, but I would have assumed that it was dry-clean only, unless perhaps it was disposable.)

They also have rules. Rule number fourteen is "Women should smell like fruit. Men should smell like men."

I do not want to know what this stuff smells like.

I do not want to know what it is made from, either.

Imperfectly spoonerized song lyrics

2008-08-12T19:20:31Z

Drawings

2008-08-11T02:34:55Z

You've probably already read more than enough about the drawing of Barack and Michelle Obama that recently appeared on the cover of The New Yorker. I don't really have anything to add to that discussion, except to say that I wish more of the people who wrote about it had (as Arnold Zwicky at Language Log did) bothered to note the title of the piece, which was "The Politics of Fear." (To find the title, you actually have to open the magazine and look it up in the table of contents, but I think it's worth the effort.) Once you know the title, the satirical intent of the drawing is clear; it is an image of a paranoid racist fantasy extrapolated by the American right from the fist bump in the centre of the page. All that remains to be debated is the effectiveness of the satire; the obvious objection is that it is simply not possible to satirize something that is itself already as outrageous as the frenetically slanderous bushwa of Fox News and its ilk.

So what I'd like to talk about instead is another recent New Yorker drawing that I happen to find considerably more offensive than "The Politics of Fear," but which will undoubtedly receive nowhere near the same degree of attention. This one is by Seymour Chwast, and it appears on page 87 of the August 11 & 18 issue, illustrating a piece by Nicholas Lemann called "Conflict of Interests," which discusses Thomas Frank's new book The Wrecking Crew in the context of Arthur Bentley's hundred-year-old book The Process of Government. Here's the relevant portion of the picture, together with its caption:

Well, let's see here. What kinds of interest groups do we belong to?

business executives
doctors
construction workers
women

In the world depicted in this drawing, then, your interests are defined by your profession if you are a man, but by your sex if you are a woman. (I'm making some inferences here, of course, but I think they're reasonable ones—it's not completely unambiguous what group the guys in suits are supposed to represent, for example, but I'm assuming that because they are dressed so similarly, their defining characteristic is meant to be their occupation, or perhaps their wealth, but in any case not their sex.)

Remind me again—what century is it?

Of course, an illustration is just an illustration, and any drawing that could have gone in this space would necessarily abstract away from all sorts of complexities discussed in the article itself. In the real world, each of us belongs not to a single group, but to several overlapping ones, with various and sometimes conflicting interests, but it would be rather awkward to try to convey all of this in the picture. Nor do I expect each little trio in the drawing to be perfectly representative of the demographics of the group it signifies; you just can't do that with three figures. That's not the problem. The problem is that in this picture, women are the only group defined by what they are instead of what they do, and there are (as far as I can tell) no women at all among the groups defined by occupation.

Obviously, this sexist view of the world is not the point of the illustration. This (combined with the fact that it appears inside the magazine, rather than on the cover) is why it will not elicit the same uproar as "The Politics of Fear," where the racism was the point. It's also what makes it so much more insidious than the controversial cover, and that's precisely why I feel compelled to point it out.

No woman but the best?

2008-07-30T19:10:42Z

Every now and then, an article in my morning newspaper will call to mind scenes of high fantasy presumably uncontemplated by the journalist who wrote it. Consider for example the following sentence, from a piece by Tim Harper, of the Star's Washington bureau, speculating about potential vice-presidential candidates for the upcoming election in the United States:

With many of her supporters still reticent [sic] to move into the Obama camp, there is a sense the nominee would also be reluctant to pick Kansas Governor Kathleen Sibelius [sic] for fear of further alienating Clinton backers who believe the New York senator is the most qualified woman in the country.

Here's how I pictured it: (Please forgive the prose style; I'm seriously out of my genre here.)

Sir Barack sighed. The prophecy of the Clintonites was clear: "No woman but Hillary shall be thy squire." But Lady Hillary was a formidable warrior in her own right, and had contended against Sir Barack in the jousts that had determined who should lead this quest. Even if she consented to be his squire, it would be an uneasy partnership.

Suddenly, an armor-clad figure burst through the door. "I will be your squire, sir!" the figure announced, in a voice somewhat muffled by the cumbersome helmet that obscured its face. "But what of the prophecy?" asked Sir Barack. The figure removed the helmet, revealing a startlingly masculine face and a head of close-shorn, greying hair. "I am no woman!" proclaimed Tim Kaine, for the figure was he.

But politics—even American politics—is not fantasy, no matter how fantastic it may seem at times. Most of Senator Clinton's supporters, I should think, believe that she is the most qualified person (of either sex) for the job. A great many of them are feminists. Why on earth would they be more alienated by the choice of Governor Sebelius (or any similarly qualified woman) than by the choice of Governor Kaine (or any similarly qualified man)?

This "sense" that support for Clinton means that Obama cannot choose any other woman as his running mate is nonsensical. Its an existence is a reminder of how far North American political culture has to go to achieve anything like true equality between the sexes. The fact that a woman can be a serious contender for the nomination of a major party is good, but it is nowhere near good enough if there still lurks behind it the notion that one female contender blocks any possibility of another female contender, while male candidates are always an option. And it's not just the political culture, either; I'm reminded of a somewhat clue-deficient professor of mathematics who asked a colleague of mine, "Is there another woman in your department?" (Well, yes, actually—in fact a large majority of the faculty there are women. Why do you ask?)

The vice-presidential nomination will not necessarily go to the most qualified candidate. (As Kim "Qoheleth" Campbell would say, the race is not always to the swift.) There are always lots of considerations other than the question of who would actually be best at the job of being vice president. Some reasons for rejecting a candidate are better than others, but "Sorry, we've already considered someone else of your sex" is one of the worst.

John McCain really doesn't know the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan

2008-07-27T17:16:24Z

As discussed in a recent post on Language Log, John McCain has an interesting tendency to say "Iraq" when one might expect to hear "Afghanistan." In the most notorious example, he referred to "the Iraq-Pakistan border"; this led to some speculation about whether he really thought there was such a border (the least charitable hypothesis), or whether it was just a slip of the tongue (Mark Liberman's charitable interpretation), or whether "the Iraq-Pakistan border" is the new way to say "Iran" (my suggestion).

From what I heard on CBC Radio last night, though, I'm now inclined to think that McCain really does think that Afghanistan and Iraq are the same place. The CBC played a clip in which McCain made an ‘argument’ that can be paraphrased as follows:

Barack Obama says that the U.S. should send more troops to Afghanistan.
Sending more troops constitutes a surge.
But Barack Obama said that the surge in Iraq was a bad idea.
Therefore, Barack Obama is being inconsistent. Nyeah, nyeah, nyeah!

McCain's reasoning is sound if and only if "Iraq" and "Afghanistan" refer to the same place, or perhaps if there is One Correct Strategy that applies to all conflicts everywhere. If John McCain believes either one of those things, it would be extremely foolish and dangerous to put him in charge of deciding where to deploy U.S. military forces.

UPDATE: This post has now been incorporated into Number 35 in The Ridger's series called What's Important, an enlightening and frequently alarming look at John McCain's misguided and fluctuating platform and his disingenuous campaign tactics.

The English room

2008-07-24T03:54:28Z

A couple of days ago, my morning newspaper published a sidebar¹ from Reuters about "some steps taken by Chinese officials to get Beijing ready for the Olympics." One item reads as follows:

Chinglish: Officials have been trying to wipe out Chinglish, a quirky, nonsensical language combining both Chinese and English, off menus and road signs. One example? “Racist Park” signpost at a park celebrating ethnic diversity. Crimes against grammar range from spelling mistakes to paragraphs of total gibberish.

This is egregiously misleading on at least three counts. (It's also rather poorly written.)

First of all, the term "Chinglish," at least as it is used here, does not refer to a language; it is a (rather unfortunate) name for English text that has been badly translated from Chinese. It's the sort of translation you get when the translator is largely ignorant of either the source language or the target language, and is thus not in a position to do sanity checks to make sure that the translation actually means approximately the same thing as the original. (This happens a lot with unsupervised machine translation; if you're using a computer to translate text into a language you don't know, you might even end up mistaking an error message for a translation.) You look in your Chinese-English dictionary for an adjective meaning something to do with race; you find racist; you don't know what it means, and don't bother looking it up in the English-Chinese section of the dictionary to find out; and then all of a sudden there are a bunch of English-speaking tourists laughing at the sign outside your well-meaning park.

It's a bit like John Searle's famous Gedankenexperiment in which a person who speaks no Chinese is confined to a room containing a book with detailed instructions for manipulating Chinese characters. Chinese text comes in, and the person looks up what to do with it, performs the necessary operations, and sends out the reply. The person in the room appears to be communicating in Chinese, but in fact has no comprehension of the content of any of the messages. Searle's point was to suggest that even if we someday manage to make a computer that fluently manipulates natural language, that still won't mean that it understands anything. But if we replace the wonderful book in Searle's room with an ordinary bilingual dictionary (and swap languages), this approximates the situation of the hapless translator rather nicely.

There's nothing particularly special about "Chinglish" as compared to bad translations between other pairs of languages. (This blog, for example, is named after a mistranslation of my own that could perhaps be called an example of Czenglish.) If bad Chinese-to-English translations are more common than some other types, this may be because (1) the two languages are not related to each other, so the translator gets no help from cognates, (2) the two languages use different writing systems, so it takes more work to learn to read both of them, and (3) there are more Chinese-to-English translations than there are English-to-Chinese translations out there on the menus and signposts of the world. (Englinese is no less risible than "Chinglish"; it's just less common.)

In any case, "Chinglish" is not a language in the formal sense, because it would be absurd to ask whether a given sequence of words is or is not a well-formed utterance of Chinglish. And it's not a language in the functional sense, because the people who write it don't know what it says, and the people who read it don't know what it means.

Secondly, "Chinglish" doesn't really combine English and Chinese. The words are English, and they're influenced by Chinese only indirectly. There are certain patterns of substitutions and other errors that tend to come up because of ambiguities in possible correspondences between Chinese characters and English words—for example, 'dry' is often rendered as 'fuck'—but that's not at all the same thing as "combining ~~both~~ Chinese and English."

Thirdly, spelling is not grammar, dammit. (And I don't much care for this rather tired metaphor of "crimes against grammar" in any case, but it seems especially inappropriate in a context where the infractions are clearly unintentional.)

Why does any of this matter, apart from my general preference that my morning paper report truths rather than falsehoods? Aren't these errors fairly trivial? Well, it matters because this sort of nonsense has the potential to confound the way people think about real languages, and here I am thinking in particular of Singlish. Singlish really is a language:² people speak it, on purpose, and use it to communicate with one another, and fluent speakers can readily distinguish sensible Singlish sentences from gibberish. Singlish combines elements of English and Chinese (and Malay and Tamil and a few others besides). I believe it could reasonably be characterized as "quirky." (What natural language could not?)

So part of the trouble with the newspaper's account is that their description of "Chinglish" makes it sound very much like Singlish (except, of course, for the part about being nonsensical). If Reuters and the Toronto Star can't be bothered to differentiate between "a language that combines elements of other languages" and "a collection of bad translations from one language to another," then they are contributing to the misconception that mixed languages are somehow degenerate or inferior.³ To mistake a mistake for a language makes it easier to mistake a language for a mistake.

1. The main article to which it was adjoined was about attempts to reduce air pollution in Beijing, also for the Olympics.

2. In calling Singlish a language, I don't mean to get into such vexed questions as how to distinguish between a language and a dialect, or when to say that an interlanguage has become a pidgin, or a pidgin has become a creole. All I mean is that Singlish is very clearly something that "Chinglish" is not.

3. Consider, for example, the Singaporean government's effort to get people to speak English instead of Singlish; what I read in the newspaper obscures the differences between this and the Chinese government's effort to improve the quality of the English translations on public signage.

Heart and soul

2008-07-17T20:18:45Z

	I love the tonic,
The minor relative,
	Then the subdominant,
And then I love the fifth.

Boom de yada,

Boom de yada.

Whistling Dixie

2008-07-06T21:36:15Z

Mistah Helms, he dead.

I'm certainly not going to pretend to be at all saddened by that fact, but I'm not dancing for joy, either. The United States Senate was much improved by Jesse Helms's departure,¹ but his departure from the world of the living does nothing to repair the harm he did over the course of his long and nasty political career. Of all the right-wing lunatics who were in office during my formative years, Helms was probably the one I detested and resented the most, but I didn't want to see him defeated by old age and ill health; I wanted to see him defeated at the polls, preferably by Harvey Gantt, and by a very large margin.

Failing that, I would have liked to see Helms recant and repent. In later years, he did acknowledge that he had been wrong about AIDS as a global health crisis, evidently deciding that he had nothing against AIDS victims as long as they were heterosexual, and nothing against black people as long as they were in Africa. He also gave a revisionist account of his virulent opposition to the civil rights movement, claiming that what he had really objected to was government-imposed integration, and that he had thought all along that communities should just sort of integrate themselves naturally, in their own time. There is, of course, absolutely no evidence to support this interpretation, and Helms spoke of civil rights leaders, and of African Americans in general, in contemptuous terms for as long as it was politically possible to do so. In the fifties, he would rather have seen the public school system abolished than integrated.

Helms's eulogists insist that, whatever you may think of him politically, in person he was the model of the charming Southern Gentleman. This glosses over episodes such as his notorious run-in with Senator Carol Moseley Braun, in which he said he was going to sing Dixie at her until she cried. Moseley Braun was generous enough to laugh this off as just so much light-hearted collegial banter, and responded in kind by telling Helms that his singing was enough to make anyone cry, but in light of Helms's record, it's impossible to imagine that there wasn't genuine malice behind his facetious threat.

Helms used charm as a weapon. Barry Saunders, of the News & Observer, recalls a phone conversation in which Jesse said the worst thing he could have said to me: You're my favorite columnist. This statement was not one that anyone would be likely to believe; the point was presumably to make Saunders wonder, How [...] could I continue to write bad, albeit truthful, things about him after that? (As it turned out, It wasn't hard.)

In 1962, Helms and his wife, Dorothy, adopted a child with cerebral palsy, so there is reason to believe that the senator had some capacity for empathy. But he never had the imagination or courage to allow either empathy or reason to transport him beyond the commonplace bigotries of his time and place. His notion of defending freedom consisted entirely in fighting "communism"—never in standing up for individual liberties in the United States (or South Africa, or Chile)—and his notion of what constituted communism was broad enough to encompass (for example) Martin Luther King and the University of North Carolina. When the times moved forward, Helms was at best dragged reluctantly and belatedly along after them.

Rob Christensen in the N&O tells us that A number of historians say Helms' historical image will be tarnished by his opposition to the civil rights movement and the aspirations of black people. But that opposition is no mere blemish on the surface. How else should we remember "Senator No," if not as an obstacle to the rights of black people, women, and gay people? There is no metal under the corrosion; it's tarnish all the way through.

1. This statement should not be mistaken for an endorsement of his successor; to the extent that it implies that Senator Dole is an improvement over Senator Helms, this should be construed as damning her with faint praise.

A note about the illustration: The cartoon is by Dwayne Powell, of the News & Observer; it originally ran on July 7, 1980. If you are interested in calibrating your sense of who counted as a "liberal" in Jesse Helms's books, you may wish to recall that this was just a couple of months after the release of The Empire Strikes Back, and that the public had therefore not yet been exposed to the redeeming characteristics of Darth Vader that emerged three years later in Return of the Jedi.

A meme from a traveller

2008-06-29T05:02:59Z

This one's been around for a while, but The Ridger just did it again, and it looked like it might be fun. So here are, more or less, the first lines of the first twenty-five tracks to come up when I set iTunes to play my library of digitized music in pseudo-random order. Why "more or less"? Well, two tracks don't have lyrics, so for those I've given the first few bars of the melody; for songs whose first lines include their titles, I've reduced the title to initial letters and dashes; and in one instance there was a word I couldn't quite make out.

The sunlight fades behind the shades of cloud
There's n- n--- t- a---- anymore
Lord, hear my prayer
Well, I'm kinda tired of playing this game
I was sitting in Soho Square
Aghju cridutu di vede per annant'à lu stradone
I've got a [unintelligible] sublime; my spirits are high
She's got a mountain for a name
Billy ran around with a rare old crew
I got a number on me
We're sailing in a s------ b---
Show me, show me, show me how you do that trick
I----- B----, give me a ride to the city
McCormack and Richard Tauber are singing by the bed
On a Friday it fell, in the month of April
Follow me; don't follow me
Yo no me he tomado, pero me voy a tomar un traguito ahora
Pain from pearls
[sound fx: telephone ringing] J-- r----- p- f-----
I k--- y-- r----, gonna miss me when I'm gone
I danced in the morning when the world was begun
Oh, darling, why'd you talk so fast?
Down, down, come on down; follow me down to the c------ w---

What's the point? Well, ostensibly you're supposed to come up with the titles and the performers, although the latter are really not recoverable in some instances. (I'll be reasonably impressed if you can identify the languages in 6 and 21; if you think 6 is Italian, you're not too far off, but have another look at the first word.) And presumably the other point of it is that you learn something about my impeccable taste in music, except that what I have digitized is somewhat haphazard. Some of this music I love, and some of it I barely know; I think two or three of these tracks were free Singles of the Week from the iTunes Canada store.