Politics and the English Language

I first read the George Orwell article in high school English class. I enjoyed it then, and I enjoy it still more now, having read many academic articles in music and other disciplines that abuse the English language in the ways Orwell describes. In re-reading last week's election polemic, I did not come across as many examples of imprecise language use as I expected. It seems that, in crafted speeches at least, candidates take pains to make their statements clear. In Friday's debate, even as they evaded questions, Obama and McCain stuck to simple sentences with which Orwell would be hard-pressed to find fault. (Orwell could attack my prose, I'm sure... I find it hard to write clearly about anything).

Here are excerpts of candidate answers that I deem imprecise not because they violate an Orwellian rule, but because they complete evade the question (whole transcript here http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/26/debate.mississippi.transcript/):

Lehrer: Gentlemen, at this very moment tonight, where do you stand on the financial recovery plan?

Obama: ...You know, we are at a defining moment in our history. Our nation is involved in two wars, and we are going through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
And although we've heard a lot about Wall Street, those of you on Main Street I think have been struggling for a while, and you recognize that this could have an impact on all sectors of the economy. And you're wondering, how's it going to affect me? How's it going to affect my job? How's it going to affect my house? How's it going to affect my retirement savings or my ability to send my children to college? ... (he outlines his proposal without saying for or against the $700 billion bailout)

McCain: ... And, Jim, I -- I've been not feeling too great about a lot of things lately. So have a lot of Americans who are facing challenges. But I'm feeling a little better tonight, and I'll tell you why. Because as we're here tonight in this debate, we are seeing, for the first time in a long time, Republicans and Democrats together, sitting down, trying to work out a solution to this fiscal crisis that we're in. And have no doubt about the magnitude of this crisis. And we're not talking about failure of institutions on Wall Street. We're talking about failures on Main Street, and people who will lose their jobs, and their credits, and their homes, if we don't fix the greatest fiscal crisis, probably in -- certainly in our time, and I've been around a little while... (keeps going, optimistic about solution, needs to have transparency, does not come out and say he's "for" it, just that he's hopeful)

Both candidates use the terms Main Street/Wall Street. "Main Street" is becoming the kind of stock metaphor which Orwell might not like. Other than that, I think the language use abides by all Orwell's rules:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

In interviews, however, you can certainly catch a candidate in bad language use. I thought it would be too mean of me to use a Sarah Palin interview, but I managed to find a John McCain interview from last Thursday with some good "fudging" vagueness.

Gibson: Was the agreement on principles announced by Senator Dodd and Congressman Frank and others this morning -- was that enough for you to sign on, or do you want other changes in this bill?

McCain: Well, the principles frankly are those that I articulated. And as always the devil is in the details many times and I wanted to see of course whether homeowners are adequately addressed at keeping people in their homes and other aspects of it. But basically I set forth a set of principles that are very similar to these as well as the original plan of Secretary Paulson's, but there have been significant changes as we went through.

This answer has a few nice things.
(#1) Figure of speech: "The devil is in the details" is a colloquial phrase. According to Bartleby.com's The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition., it means that "even the grandest project depends on the success of the smallest components." McCain uses the phrase correctly here, but one would expect that his following remarks would elucidate those details just a little. Instead, the details remain veiled. Everything about the answer, and indeed this whole interview (just after the White House meeting when the bailout fell apart), is characterized by vagueness. McCain will not commit to rigid principles, preferring to speak about "optimism," in a way typical of most politicians.

(#4) Passive: "whether the homeowners are adequately addressed"... it's not so bad, right? But it could be "whether the plan will adequately address homeowners," and so it violates Orwell's rule #4. "There have been significant changes" should become "blank changed blank," using an active construction.

(#3) Wordy: What does the whole answer even say? I will attempt a paraphrase "I articulated the principles in response to your earlier questions, Charlie. Provisions in the bill must benefit the homeowners and aid their ability to keep their homes. My stated principles align with those already mentioned and with Secretary Paulson's original plan, but many changes have since altered the bill (or my principles? to what do the "changes" apply?)." As seen,
"there have been significant changes as we went through" is too vague -- it could refer to McCain's principles or to Paulson's plan or to the state of the economy. It provides no new information.

http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics/Story?id=5886415&page=3

Aaack! I have to be at the GRE place in 5 hours, but at least I got that done.

Before Switching to the Political Stuff...

Hello everybody, I realize you haven't heard from me for a while, and I feel very bad about that. I am taking the GRE tomorrow morning, and because of my hectic schedule (I'm feeling all of you out there who are feeling imprisoned by your over-scheduled lives. It's draining and terrifying, and it makes me incredibly moody), I haven't had the chance to prepare at all until today. So I am certainly doing things with words right now-- I am LEARNING them. I should be done by 1pm, but in case I'm late to class tomorrow, the GRE is why. I have to miss my morning class, and I can't be bothered to do the homework for it tonight because I still have so much other reading to do...

I just wanted to go back and give my recapitulating thoughts on the verbal art and wordplay section.

First off, Cockney rhyming slang. When I was making up my half-dozen play languages, I kind of "cheated." I got on Wikipedia and read about dozens of other play languages. I had never heard of rhyming slang, and I find it hysterical and amusing. It seems so much more versatile than a play language that works off syllable insertion or vowel change (although i did want to mention one of my syllable insertion languages that i thought was quite fun... adding "ge"-- pronounced "guh" after every syllable... "regemegembeger toge doge thege digesheges!!!!" Say it, I promise it's fun). Rhyming slang actually requires some sort of logical connection, replaying a word with a descriptor of a common rhyming word.

For instance, a friend, or "mate," becomes "china"... "china plate!" "Jam" is a "car," because of "jam jar." And replace "Yank" with "septic," as in "septic tank." I made up my own... "sleep" becomes "rubbish," as in "rubbish heap." A "house" becomes "Mickey," "Mickey Mouse." Can you think of a good one for "Notre Dame?" Baggage (claim)? Candle (flame)? Picture (frame)?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyming_slang

Second, I listen to a lot of Spanish-language music on the radio or Pandora, and I notice a lot of "code-switching" within songs, where the artist(s) insert an English phrase or sentence-- sometimes sung but often spoken-- into an otherwise Spanish song. This is especially noticeable in Spanish-language singers who live in the United States, like Aventura out of NYC. In their song "Mi Corazoncito," there's spoken lines like "Give us our crown," "Henry? Tell them it's my heart, mio, ok?" And, I mean, that's the first one that comes to my mind, but there are a ton of instances like that... RBD's "Tu Amor" is probably the most cheesy bilingual song I have ever heard in my life. Then of course there's Ricky Martin's "Livin' La Vida Loca." And I always get a kick out of hearing the same song in multiple languages--- Enrique Iglesias, anyone? The music video for "Dimelo" (English version: Do You Know?/The Ping-Pong Song) is interesting in that it sets up a "frame" for the performance of the song, which is interrupted multiple times in performance. The music video calls into question when the song begins and ends, and it comments on its meaning. I find the differences in the Spanish/English lyrics to be very interesting; the sounds/rhythms of the words become more important than the literal translation. I have pasted the choruses below:

Spanish:
¿Dímelo por que estás fuera de mi?
Y al mismo tiempo estás muy dentro
Dímelo sin hablar y hazme sentir
Todo lo que yo ya siento

English:
Do you know what it feels like loving someone
That's in a rush to throw you away?
Do you know what it feels like to be the last one
to know the lock on the door has changed?

Tu Amor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6WjGKmomXE
Dimelo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSp6H4SdH7Y

And I'm not always sure why Spanish artists add English lyrics. For artists who live in the U.S., it is understandable because they are probably bilingual, and there might be words and ideas they would choose to communicate in English. For huge cross-over artists like Enrique Iglesias, it makes a lot of commercial sense. RBD is a Mexican pop group composed of cast members from the telenovela Rebelde, which had a cult-ish, teen following from what I gather. I find RBD's English songs and inserts (like the persistent "baby" in "Ser o Parecer"... sooo Britney Spears) laughable, but it plays to the group's audience and is a tactic for enlarging the audience. English-language comments were a characteristic of the original tv show, too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBD

I meant to talk about that book I mentioned, Doing Our Own Thing by John McWhorter, because it collects a lot of different examples of different ways people use language. Maybe I'll go into all this tomorrow after the GRE.

Speaking of which, I just found out my ride can't take me home after I'm done with the test. So it looks like I'll be walking 4 miles back to class if I don't get this figured out by 8am. Sorry if I'm at all late or irritable tomorow.

Aack! The reading!!! Sorry for the ramble.

Making Politics Ridiculous

I am an avid follower of media coverage... I check Google News compulsively about 5 times a day, I read the NYTimes online as well as a couple dozen AP and Reuters reports (infused with Brit tabloid junk like Independent.co.uk and dailymail.co.uk -- which do have a chunk of serious articles mixed in the bizarre!). I have a penchant for the ridiculous, but I also like to know what's going on in the world around me.

And after my daily news blitz, I like to check out the Daily Show and the Colbert Report to get their take on the news of the day. The focus of both shows is primarily political-- and there is plenty of fodder in that realm to provide both shows a wealth of material to play with. Both shows appear to be a combination of careful strategic planning and spontaneity. The audiences expects wordplay and punchlines and witty comments, but there is a sense that the host is occasionally flying by the seat of his pants. Some jokes fall flat; others result from a host's mistake. Jon Stewart, especially, often is so amused by his own jokes and those of his fellow cast members that he bursts out laughing.

One tactic employed by both shows is the juxtaposition of words and images. Since they are not considered a legit newscast, they have leeway to take footage out of context and reinterpret it for their purpose. Similarly, they will place footage of speeches and interviews side-by-side to point out where the person has contradicted him/herself or where there is a logical fallacy.

I'll focus on the Daily Show and its most recent episode (Friday, recap of the Republican National Convention). Starting with a spoof video promoting John McCain, Stewart introduces the show and launches into a short monologue on Minnesota. From the very opening, the show presupposes specialized knowledge of the U.S. political system... the various personalities of McCain and Bush and Washington and the Republican Party-- and what in the world a "Convention" is, anyway. Stewart notably interacts with his audience. When the studio audience cheers, "'Woo' to you, I say," is his rejoinder, as if engaged in a polite discussion, or wishing to return a compliment. When speaking of Minnesota, he beckons the camera closer and whispers, "I don't understand these people." Stewart's inability to keep a straight face is part of his charm. Although most comedians and comic actors pride the ability of "keeping in character," Stewart has managed to be successful without donning too much of a persona. He finds obvious amusement in the absurdities of American politics and shares his enjoyment with evident glee.

Stewart (and Colbert) delight in one-liners that thwart the audience's expectation... usually by throwing in something that seems completely bizarre but, after reflection, strangely fits the situation. Or sometimes it's just completely incongruous...

After doing that videoclip thing with McCain and Bush to highlight their policy similarity, Stewart rolls a spoof McCain bio film... a voiceover narrative accompanying clips of his past and present campaigning. There is a clear pattern here-- he uses the same techniques over and over!

The Colbert Report is slightly more sophisticated in some ways. First, Steven Colbert uses a persona as a mock conversative news host. He invents words to capture concepts he is ridiculing (most famously "truthiness")... He has a segment called "the Word" where he speaks on a topic while comic bullet points appear to the viewer on the right side of the screen. Relationships and discrepancies between what he says and what the bullets say provide great comic effect.

A couple more things to mention about the Colbert Report that have to do with words are the "green screen" challenge (viewers compete to put the most hilarious background behind John McCain as he gives a speech --- it is the incongruity between the images and the words that makes the challenge humorous) and the interviewing "fill-in-the-blank" tactic. The latter is when Colbert prompts his guest to make a scandalous statement. "I do drugs because..." Colbert starts in one YouTubed clip. "Because it's a fun thing to do," says the guest after much prodding. What was most amusing about the incident is that the quote quickly spread through the mainstream media-- "OMG look what he admitted to on the Colbert Report!!!!"

I am enjoying the Sherzer reading. Besides learning lots of punny new jokes, I enjoy reading about wordplay in other languages. I never realized play languages were so universal! I remember my friend Laura and her sibling having a play language in which they changed every vowel sound to "oo." How they understood each other, I'll never know. My play languages were all text-based letter manipulations... so now I'm really good at Jumbles and Cryptograms (better at the latter than the former though).

While reading both the Sherzer and Bauman articles, I was constantly reminded of Tom Stoppard's excellent play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Does anyone else know this play? Wordplay runs rampant throughout Tom Stoppard's works. It's super funny, sometimes in a rather arcane way. (I lost a book of his plays on a bus in Barcelona so if anyone finds one and it has "New College Library" stamped on it, let me know...)

Speech Act

I apologize for having been rather tardy in the completion of today's assignment. Pursuant to today's class discussion, I have chosen a speech act to describe...

Two girls find out that an unspecified guy has a crush on one of their friends, and a little pact of secrecy develops around it. They discuss the circumstance with endless delight, feeling the power of possessing a secret. When they next see the friend, they make oblique references to the crush. They want to let the girl know that they have a secret involving her, but they won't let her in on it. They refer to the guy as "Mmmm." So the entire conversation progresses so:

A- "I wonder if Katie would like Mmmm back if she knew."
Katie-"What are you talking about? Who's Mmmm?"
B- "Yeah, I know, they would make such a cute couple."
A-"But at the same time there would be such a height discrepancy."
B-"Did you see Mmmm at lunch today? He was really trying to get your attention, Katie."
Katie- "Is Mmmm Joe? Stop it, guys! This is so mean!"

There's a lot going on in this conversation...
I would say the primary goal is phatic... the two girls A and B are using their secret to create a closer relationship, but they are doing it at the expense of Katie, who is frustrated and feeling left out. They are trying to provoke a response in Katie... is this sufficient to make the speech act conative? They are not directing Katie to do something, as they would if they said "Go talk to him, Katie." But at the same time, the taunt would not be near so much fun-- it would cease to have a point-- if Katie were to say, "Jig's up. Steven told me he liked me 2 weeks ago, and I totally am not interested."

If we analyze it in Hymes' terms (and as one big speech act), then senders are A and B and receiver is both the other, non-talking A or B (because they are in on the inside joke together) and Katie... the object of the taunt. The main factor in keeping Katie excluded is the "code," by which the guy is referred to as Mmmm. Channel is informal conversation; setting is American high school, the class after lunch; topic is gossip about boys. Message form is just... well, in this case not that important, since it's not poetic.

Those are factors -- the primary function, as mentioned above, is phatic/contact and possibly conative. There is little poetic or expressive. The referential function is present, but it is subordinate to the primary functions. A does not want to give B information so much as it wants to conceal information from Katie. Do the statements about lunch and attention-seeking behavior perform contextual and referential functions? I'd say they might provide a little bit of contextual information... Katie will start to pin down who this guy is-- he goes to their school, she saw him at lunch, he was doing something to attract her attention. The contextual element is more implied as opposed to explicit. And then, of course, I made Katie's responses metalingual... she's trying to crack the code. "What does 'Mmmm' signify? Is it X?"

(Completely unrelated to previous example)
I am reading a lot of Heine right now (in translation-- though I'm trying hard to get my German up to par-- for reading, that is, don't ask me to speak), and that gives me a few things to say about functions of communication in his writings. First off, expressive function: yes, Heine expresses a lot of feelings and thoughts, but they're not necessarily true... even in personal letters he often takes on a persona who is designed to make the reader think (about their prejudices, about society, about what Heine is getting at). So he is consciously, purposely insincere every moment. And poetic function is important for Heine whether the piece of writing is poetry or prose. The referential content is often thickly veiled-- you can't take any sentence at face value without considering why he chose each individual word. Taken together, the cadences and choices of words make for incredibly fun reading, but you really have to slow down and take in the details to "understand" him. Conative seems to be always the most important function -- Heine is always wanting the reader to do something (read critically for one! also exhorting them to behave rationally, think his way about things, emancipate ppl, etc.).

I understand why Jakobson would be pretty influential in his view of poetics "as an integral part of linguistics (350)." As complicated as extemporaneous utterances can be to analyze, "noncasual" prose and poetry-- assiduously planned and loaded with layers of meaning--are absolute nightmares (yet attractive and totally fascinating). I like that Jakobson starts from the vantage point of literature as communication, which offers a different starting point than a more formal, grammatical approach. At the same time, I feel like the questions we are asking about speech acts are often the same questions we started off with for a work of literature in my high school English classes. So, I have tools both to analyze literature as communication and to analyze verbal communication as a work of literature (verbal art!).

Actually, I have no clue what I'm doing, but it sure is fun. To me, it's like a Rubik's cube or a really hard knot... except that it seems ultimately impossible to come to a completely clear, consistent understanding of meaning in poetry or in a speech act. But hey! That's why criticism/analysis never dies!

Tutorial Reports

This is slightly off-topic, but I'd say it relates in a sort of tangential way. You remember that example from the Grice reading about the person applying for a philosophy job (p.52)? Well, it really cracked me up, thinking back to my year at Oxford last year. (From that paragraph alone, I guessed that Grice was an Oxonian, and sure enough, Wikipedia agrees).

At Oxford, the degree and scoring systems work differently than they do in the States. For instance, "cumulative GPA" and "semester grades" are totally bewildering concepts to Oxford students, who think along lines of tutorials and papers (not papers like essays, papers as in final-final exam papers at the end of your 3 years). My grades from Oxford are conversions of my term tutorial reports. To the best of my knowledge, tutors' tutorial reports are generally brief, brutally honest synopses of a student's work during that term. But when I read my first set, it was slightly startling to see all my work evaluated in three sentences like: "Caitlin completed all her written work to a good standard. She showed up at all the scheduled tutorials prepared and spoke well on the assigned material. She needs to do more critical listening," or something like that (I wish I had the exact text because it was even less positive and more ambivalent than that). A whole semester ND grade had to be determined based on that! (no wonder my GPA dropped...) But in the Oxford system, tutorial reports don't usually count for anything. They are just used internally to gauge students' progress. When I asked my tutors how I was doing and what in my work could be improved, they just said that I was doing well enough and seemed confused that I thought the content of my tutorial report implied that I was doing poorly. They told me that if my work were lacking, they would say that explicitly in my tutorial report.

By the end of the year, I was getting more positive adjectives in my tutorial reports--I wonder whether my work really got better or they realized that Americans expect more laudatory language and were adjusting my reports for the different purpose they served in my case. In any case, this is an example of a time when differences in convention led me to imply something different than what my tutor intended. [Throughout the year, I was rather uncertain of the expectations for me-- and my tutors were uncertain of what I wanted and needed to learn-- and my ND department had trouble figuring out how to credit the work I did towards my degree... yeah, it was a fun year]

Now I'm asking one of my tutors for a letter of recommendation, and I hope he has more good things to say about me than Grice's philosophy tutor...


And I'll do another post later on the reading for Mon.

Performativity2

Connecting the readings to the world, hmm? I thought I'd better add on to my previous post with more of an observed world connection. When I attended Mass last night, all I could think about were the ways in which words were used to enact the rituals associated with Communion and other Mass parts. "The Lord be with you," and the response "and also with you," is a perfect example of the type of performance utterance we are studying. It is a blessing and a prayer and a hope expressing good intentions for the community and for the special presence of God in others' lives. We read about how utterances react to facts in the world but also influence the world. The Creed, then, expresses truths we hold (sincerely or not?) in our hearts, and it also becomes true by our affirmation.

In my Sacramental Theology a few semesters back, we read Aquinas and other theologians about the circumstances which make the sacrament efficacious, and a lot of what we read had to do with words. For Communion, there has to be a priest, he has to say the formula in a certain setting, in a certain order and all that jazz. I don't remember the specifics (I'm actually not Catholic, I go to Mass and don't take Communion), but it definitely should give our class some food for discussion.

Performativity

The readings for tomorrow's class focus on "performativity," or use of language to perform actions. In the characteristic manner of philosophy writings, the essays by Searle and Austin quickly become complicated and dense. The cumulative impact of these readings on me was a newfound awareness and appreciation for the complexities of interpersonal communication. Each time an individual utters a sentence, this action is prone to analysis on several different levels. We can talk about the intention of the speaker, the propositional content, the function indicated by the sentence structure, whether the circumstances surrounding the utterance are "felicitous," and how/whether the statement projects the speaker's identity.

I don't think I'm very good at intensively analyzing philosophical essays. Austin succeeded in convincing me of the existence of performative utterances, and I followed him and agreed with him throughout his discussion. I was surprised at the end when he brought statements under the category of performative utterances.

I don't know what to think about the role of intention in speech acts. It seems to me that much communication is unintentional or misinterpreted or insincere. If you talk to yourself or to a friend and are overheard, you have communicated something to an unintended audience. If your cell phone breaks up and your friend hears "buy the tickets now," instead of "DON'T buy the tickets now," this would seem to affect matters. Austin talked about "infelicities," and I suppose these instances would fall under the "infelicitous" category. Is there more we can say about intercepted or interrupted communication? I hardly know, but I will give the matter some more thought.

The most interesting part of the Searle excerpt was the discussion of the intentional and conventional aspects of the illocutionary act. This was in the section on "meaning" (44-46). What sets apart a speech act from a series of sounds or shapes is that one "means something" by those sounds or scribbles. We say that those words or letters "have meaning." What is boggling is that verbal communication is wrapped up in the participants as much as in the word-symbols. The speaker wants the listener to recognize that it is his intention to communicate a certain meaning. The words and inflection and timing etc. that the speaker chooses are determined by convention, which includes the rules of grammar and etiquette. At least, I think that's what Searle says.

In the Hall article, what stood out to me was the mention of Michelle Rosaldo, whose work we are reading next week. I am curious to see what she has to say after the preview given in the Hall article. According to Hall, Rosaldo argues that Austin and Searle's emphasis on intention and sincerity is ethnocentric. Across cultures, the speaker's psychology does not necessarily affect the success of their illocutionary acts. After reading this, I wonder what other characteristics of verbal speech vary significantly among language groups and cultures. I wonder how the characteristics of the English language and the conventions of American academic society influence our study of speech acts.

And then of course, mobile communication opens up another can of worms. How do we assess the felicity of a text message sent via mobile phone. Are people more or less inclined to be sincere when the communication is not face-to-face? Are people held more accountable when you have their promise storied in SMS or voicemail?

Just my initial thoughts, as they come.