Category: politics

Book Review: Dialect Diversity in America by William Labov

Joe McVeighLeave a comment
Cover of Dialect Diversity in America: The Politics of Language Change by William Labov.

Dialect Diversity in America: The Politics of Language Change starts off by spelling out one of the difficulties in linguistic research and communicating it to the public:

In many areas of culture or technology, some older people will embrace and welcome the new. But in thousands of sociolinguistic interviews, no one has ever been heard to say, “I really like the way that young people talk today; it’s so much better than the way we talked when I was young.” Most of us adhere to what one may call the Golden Age Syndrome: the belief that language once existed in a state of perfection, and any change is a decline from that state, to be resisted. (p. viii)

This really is the first and greatest of hills that linguists need to get over in order to talk about language to the public. I wouldn’t be surprised if linguists also have to get their undergrad students over this hill. So it’s good that Labov starts by surmounting this hill because the majority of the book is about African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and other non-standard varieties or dialects (linguistics pro-tip: non-standard does not mean substandard, it just means “not at all or not as highly privileged as the standard”). It’s also good that Labov is the one writing this book. He is a legend in the field of linguistics and his writing is clear and direct.

Cover of Dialect Diversity in America: The Politics of Language Change by William Labov.
Cover of Dialect Diversity in America: The Politics of Language Change by William Labov.

Chapter 1 is a bit of a primer on linguistics. It tells non-linguists what they need to know to read this book and it summarizes the arguments of each chapter. It begins with something that might be shocking to many non-linguists:

People tend to believe that dialect differences in American English are disappearing, especially given our exposure to a fairly uniform broadcast standard in the mass media […] This overwhelmingly common opinion is simply and jarringly wrong. (pp. 1-2)

I made reference to this idea in a previous post and Labov is right that (some) people think everyone sounds more similar today than they did 10, 20, or 50 years ago – even though the opposite is true. I’m happy to say that Dialect Diversity does an excellent job of showing why American dialects are diverging. The CliffNotes version is: people do speak differently than they did when you were a kid, but their dialects are actually more different than they were back then and they are different in different ways. (I’m not good at CliffNotes. Read the whole book)

At the end of chapter 2, Labov makes an excellent point about our knowledge of language and what we do with it.

Most importantly, the (ING) variable [pronouncing the g in running vs. no pronouncing it in runnin’] is a prototypical example of orderly heterogeneity. It does not interfere with communication: we know that working and workin’, dunking and dunkin’, mean the same thing. Furthermore, the variation of (ING) works for us to establish levels of formality and informality and in any given context, the level of –in’ also tells us something about the social status of the speaker. In a word, we understand (ING). That does not prevent us from attacking Sarah Palin for “dropping her g’s.” Public rhetoric about language is always several stages removed from reality. Because we understand what (ING) is all about, we can always pick it up and use it as a club to beat our opponents on the head and shoulders with, linguistically speaking. (p. 16)

So even though people understand what is being said – and why it is being said in a certain way – we still can’t get over criticizing others (especially women and minorities) for the language that they use. The (ING) variable is even more perfect because everyone – everyone? Yes, everyone – uses it in at least some cases.

I have no notes on chapter 3 except that it is very interesting. Fun even. I guess it was too fun for me to stop and take notes 🙂

Chapter 5, “The Politics of African American English” discusses the divergence of Black and White English in America and how this is affecting African American literacy (the divergence is described in chapter 4). One of the most eye-opening passages in this book comes even before Labov talks about the Ebonics controversy (which Labov was right in the middle of). Labov writes about the ways that researchers have tried to influence the methods of teaching students who are native AAVE speakers.

To do this [giving children who speak AAVE the capacity to understand and use both AAVE and standard English], it is generally agreed that contrastive analysis is helpful: putting the two systems side by side and showing the learner how they differ. […] Contrastive analysis thus depends on and develops knowledge of both systems, for both children and teachers. It is generally understood that knowledge of other groups and different cultures reduces hostility and prejudice toward them. Our sociolinguistic studies find the strongest prejudices against minority groups among those people who have had the least contact with (and the least knowledge of) them. Nevertheless, efforts to use contrastive analysis in the teaching of reading have brought forth a series of political firestorms of increasing intensity which have defeated one program after another. (p. 73, bolding mine)

The sentence I put in bold is shocking and depressing and maddening all at once. But maybe more important is the fact that contrastive analysis sounds logical. It’s no wonder that idiots killed it. Never underestimate people’s desire to force others to speak like them and only like them. Teachers have the power to accept or delegitimize students’ speech and they should be careful with how they use this power. The reason this matters is because it denies kids an education. Labov shows on the following pages that people who said AAVE is “bad English”, “slang” and “ignorant and careless speech” – that is people who did not know what they were talking about, and did not know the linguistics behind AAVE – were able to shape the debate and force unproven and unhelpful teaching methods onto already marginalized children:

The same political reaction to the recognition of AAVE by the school system can be observed in a series of controversies that followed [the negative and uninformed reaction, published in the NAACP’s The Crisis, to early research on AAVE]. In case after case, efforts to use linguistic knowledge of AAVE for contrastive analysis were reported and condemned as programs for teaching children to speak a corrupt brand of English. The idea that African American children spoke a coherent dialect of their own was consistently rejected […] (p. 74)

Labov then goes on to show how complaints about AAVE, or Ebonics, are usually thinly veiled admissions of racism. The dialect is used as a publicly acceptable way to disparage all black people; linguistic discrimination being the last allowable act of bigotry in high-minded liberal corridors. The examples he lists are vile and I don’t want to repeat them here, but in something any linguist could see coming a mile away, the people trying to satirize AAVE end up showing that they do not know how AAVE works. To these Labov only writes “Here again one can see the distance between public discussion and linguistic reality” and calls these hot takes “uninformed reaction[s] masquerading under the ‘helmet of wit’”. They are this but they are worse than that. People who stopped studying math in high school don’t make claims about how math should be taught. But people with high school English under their belt feel comfortable in pedant-splaining to others how language should be taught.

After this Labov shows why linguistic knowledge is important in teaching – through the efforts made by him and other researchers once they were given room (and funding) to develop successful methods for teaching children who speak non-standard varieties such as AAVE. Labov and his colleagues developed contrastive analysis books to help children learn to read. If you’re wondering why those books were written in standard English, it’s because of the teachers’ reactions. Labov says

The battle for the recognition of AAVE in the classroom […] might be won, but it would be a long and expensive battle, waged at the expense of children who could have learned to read under a more realistic approach. The approach that has been taken in The Reading Road and Portals [the material developed by Labov and colleagues] is to provide contrastive eanalysis for the teachers rather than for the students. (pp. 92-93)

Linguists who try to point out that all dialects are rule-governed and that no dialect is better than any other dialect and that non-standard does not mean substandard often receive a sneer from language peevers, “Then why did you write your book in Standard English? Hmmm?” It’s for the people who are not proficient in dialects other than Standard English. The dialect of Standard English is something people can easily acquire because there are more than enough resources out there to teach it. The materials on non-standard dialects are a fraction of what there is for the standard dialect. Books are written in a dialect, by the way. It just happens to be the slang of prigs.

The last two chapters in Dialect Diversity in America take a look at the long history of the shifting dialects in the United States, specifically the Northern Cities Shift. Labov stretches his thesis across almost 200 years of history and ties it to the political switcheroo made by the Republican and Democratic parties. I’ll admit that these chapters lost me a bit, as I found some of the claims a bit more hard to grasp than in the previous chapters. I’m not doubting that Labov has done his research, I just think that the arguments in Chapters 7 and 8 didn’t seem as iron clad as the arguments in earlier chapters. I think, however, that people who are more into sociology, anthropology, politics and/or history than they are into linguistics might find this part of the book is their favorite. This book was, after all, written for non-linguists. If anything, it takes linguistics out of the research lab and applies it to the real world.

I really enjoyed this book and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in American dialects.

Dialect Diversity in America: The Politics of Language Change (2012) is available from the University of Virginia press for $19.50. There is apparently an online collection of audio to accompany the book, but I did not review these (I got my copy of the book from the library and I can’t remember seeing a reference to the online audio. Maybe it’s in the 2014 edition). You can find a glowing review of Dialect Diversity in America by the distinguished linguist John Baugh here. (PDF for those behind the paywall).

Book review: Dog whistles, Walk-Backs & Political Handshakes by McCutcheon and Mark

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

As the authors state in their foreword (pp. xii-xiii):

This book represents an attempt to defang the slang and crack the code. In writing this, we tried to think back to when we were new to Washington and wishing, like wandering tourists lost in a foreign city, that we had a handy all-in-one-place phrasebook.

I would say they have largely accomplished this. Dog Whistles, Walk-backs & Washington Handshakes is an up-to-date glossary of American political terms. I think that people interested in language and politics would find this book enjoying for a few reasons. First, the book is well referenced (always a plus). The authors are not trying to discover the first known use of some political code word, but rather to show that politicians from all sides use this type of language and that you are likely to come across it in tomorrow’s newspaper or news broadcast. So their references mostly come from very recent sources, which is refreshing. The foreword and introduction make nuanced points about language and slang, and the authors back up these points with references to reputable sources.

Dog Whistles has appeal for people who follow American politics, since although they are likely to already know some of the terms in here, they will probably find some they don’t know or haven’t thought about. That’s because the book isn’t just made up of eye-catching terms such as Overton window and San Fransisco values. Readers will appreciate the care that the authors have taken to explain each term. For example, here is the entry for the seemingly innocent term bold (p. 40):

Bold: A politician’s most common description of their own or their party’s proposals. It manages to be a punchy, optimistic-sounding break with conventional thinking and deliberately vague all at once.

Image copyright ForeEdge and University Press of New England
Image copyright ForeEdge and University Press of New England

But the book is not just for language and politics heads. In the introduction (p. ix), the authors recognize the problem that people who do not closely follow politics might have when reading about or listening to their representatives:

For most of the population – let’s call them “regular, normal people” – time spent listening to legislation, operatives, and journalists thrash over public policy on cable or a website can often result in something close to a fugue state, induced by the repeated use of words and phrases that have little if any connection to life as it is lived on planet Earth.

Later (p. 129), the authors explain the importance of their glossary by saying that:

Knowing the meanings of such specialized political terms can help cut through spin meant to obscure what’s really going on in a campaign. When politicians use the cliché, “The only poll that counts is the one on Election Day,” they really mean, “I wouldn’t win if the election were held today.”

I am all for educating people about the intricacies of language, especially when that means explaining the ways that politicians use words and phrases to trick people.
I am, however, not sure that all of the terms deserve being placed in this book. I feel like a glossary should include words that are at least nominally used by a group of people. But in their attempt to be current, the authors have included phrases such as hardship porn. This is a phrase coined by Frank Bruni of the New York Times and it only returns two hits on Google News – the July 2015 article in which Bruni coined it and an October 2015 book review in the Missoula Independent. However influential Frank Bruni is, this term has not caught on yet.

This is really nitpicking though (something us academics excel at, thankyouverymuch). I really found this book enjoyable. If you like politics, language, or both, you will probably enjoy it too. You can check out the interactive website here: http://dogwhistlebook.com/ and even suggest you own term.

 

 

References

McCutcheon, Chuck and David Mark. 2014. Dog Whistles, Walk-backs & Washington Handshakes: Decoding the Jargon, Slang, and Bluster of American Political Speech. ForeEdge: New Hampshire.

The language of the environment: climate change vs global warming

Joe McVeigh2 Comments

Peter Friederici, in a recent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, reminds us that “the language used to characterize the climate problem is far more important than is generally recognized”. Mr. Friederici’s article links to a CBS piece which states things more bluntly:

If you’re trying to get someone to care about the way the environment is changing, you might want to refer to it as “global warming,” rather than “climate change,” according to a new study

The idea is that global warming sounds more dire than climate change. Global warming is more likely to inspire people to do something drastic or force their government to take major steps, but climate change requires only minor steps to solve. So tree-hugging liberals will want to use global warming to fire up their base, while the term climate change is more amenable to the conservative approach of letting the free market sort things out. This idea has been floating around for just over ten years. It was inspired by the American political pollster Frank Luntz. While consulting the Republican Party in 2002, Luntz wrote a memo to President George W. Bush’s staff which read in part:

It’s time for us to start talking about “climate change” instead of global warming […] “Climate change” is less frightening than “global warming.” […] While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.

Similar ideas about the differences between these seemingly synonymous terms have been raised in other news outlets. The two articles above also report the results of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, which found that:

the term “global warming” is associated with greater public understanding, emotional engagement, and support for personal and national action than the term “climate change.” […] Our findings strongly suggest that the terms global warming and climate change are used differently and mean different things in the minds of many Americans.

The report also says that:

Americans are four times more likely to say they hear the term global warming in public discourse than climate change.

The crucial element missing from all of these news articles and reports is any actual data about how often these terms are used. So let’s see if we can find that out.

Easier said than done

There are a few things to think about before we get started with the data. First, although Luntz’s recommendations were informed by his discussions with voters, we don’t know if President Bush or the Republican party actually listened to him. Reporting that Republicans were advised to use climate change instead of global warming doesn’t mean that they actually did so. Perhaps the reason for this is that it seems Bush didn’t use either term. He didn’t use them in his debates with Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and he only used the term global climate change once in both his 2007 and 2008 State of the Union addresses:

And these technologies will help us be better stewards of the environment, and they will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change. – George W. Bush, State of the Union 2007

The United States is committed to strengthening our energy security and confronting global climate change. – George W. Bush, State of the Union 2008

So it’s hard to report on something happening when it didn’t happen. Ironically, Kerry used global warming once in his debate in St. Louis and twice in Coral Gables, so maybe he also got Luntz’s memo?

The second thing to think about is that reporting that Americans claim they hear global warming more often that climate change doesn’t mean that they actually do. People are really bad at accurately reporting things like this. For example, before I present the data to you, I want you to ask yourself which term you think is more common on various American news outlets. Based on the information above, do you think Fox News uses global warming more often or climate change? How about NPR and MSNBC? We’ll see whether the numbers back you up in a bit.

Finally, I’m going to take my data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which is a 450 million word database of speech and writing that is “suitable for looking at current, ongoing changes in the language”. I wrote about why it is better to use corpora like COCA instead of the Google N-gram viewer here.

Crunching the numbers

Let’s first see how common each of these terms are. COCA allows us to split up our data into different genres depending on where the texts come from – Spoken, Fiction, Magazine, Academic, and Newspaper – so we can look at only the genres we are interested in. For the purposes of this blog post, I’m going to look at news texts, magazine texts and spoken language data. We could also look at academic genres, but that might be problematic since according to the CBS article “Scientists have largely started using the term climate change because it more accurately describes the myriad changes to the climate […] while global warming refers to a single phenomenon.” So academics are very particular in the terms they use (seriously, we write whole sections of our theses just to define our terms and we love doing it).

Climate change
SECTION ALL SPOKEN MAGAZINE NEWSPAPER
FREQ 3136 806 1510 820
PER MIL 6.77 8.43 15.8 8.94

 

Climate change
SECTION 1990-1994 1995-1999 2000-2004 2005-2009 2010-2012
FREQ 156 174 390 1541 883
PER MIL 1.5 1.68 3.79 15.1 17.01

Here we can see the raw count (FREQ) for climate change in the Spoken, Magazine, and Newspaper sections of COCA, as well as for the term in different time periods. This is basically the number of times that the term appears in each section. We also have the frequency per million words (PER MIL), which is a way of normalizing the various sections because they each have a different amount of total words. Looking at this more accurate stat, we can see that climate change is most common in the Magazine genre and that its usage (in all genres taken together) increases over time.

Global warming
SECTION ALL SPOKEN MAGAZINE NEWSPAPER
FREQ 4031 1063 1801 1147
PER MIL 8.68 11.12 18.85 12.51

 

Global Warming
SECTION 1990-1994 1995-1999 2000-2004 2005-2009 2010-2012
FREQ 519 375 763 1854 520
PER MIL 4.99 3.63 7.41 18.17 10.02

Here we have the same stats for global warming. They show that the term is more common in all of the genres and time periods, except for 2010–2012, when the normalized frequency drops down to 10.02. In the same time period, the frequency for climate change is 17.02. Conservatives are winning!

Not so fast, tiger. We still don’t know who is using these words. Remember that global warming only refers to one of the many changes happening to our planet. Maybe those in the media picked up on this and started using climate change where it was more appropriate. So let’s cut up the genres.

Didn’t you get the memo?

So President Bush didn’t use climate change or global warming. But perhaps this idea that the opposing sides of the debate should use different terms has filtered down to the talking heads on TV. If we remember the idea that people believe they hear global warming more often than climate change in public discourse, we can look at the Spoken section of the corpus to check this claim. Here is where you can check your guesses about which term is more common on various news outlets. Below are the frequencies for climate change in the different sections of the Spoken corpus.

Climate change
Spoken # PER MILLION # TOKENS # WORDS
FOX 19.51 123 6,302,918
NPR 18.45 321 17,399,724
PBS 12.1 80 6,612,202
CNN 5.37 111 20,656,861
NBC 4.41 28 6,348,632
MSNBC 3.68 3 814,156
CBS 3.41 44 12,887,290
ABC 3.29 51 15,514,463
Indep 0.23 1 4,343,343

So climate change occurs about 19 times per million words on Fox News and about 3 times per million words on MSNBC. #TOKENS refers to the actual number of times the term appears in each subsection, while # WORDS refers to how many words make up each subsection.

Here are the same stats for global warming:

Global warming
Spoken # PER MILLION # TOKENS # WORDS
FOX 36.33 229 6,302,918
MSNBC 31.93 26 814,156
NPR 17.82 310 17,399,724
PBS 13.16 87 6,612,202
CNN 8.37 173 20,656,861
ABC 6.96 108 15,514,463
Indep 6.22 27 4,343,343
CBS 4.03 52 12,887,290
NBC 3.15 20 6,348,632

Interestingly enough, Fox news tops both lists. What’s strange, though, is that we should have expected a conservative/Republican news site like Fox to use the climate change much more than global warming, but that is not the case (they really are fair and balanced!). NPR and PBS use the terms with almost equal frequency, while the commie pinkos over at MSNBC use global warming at a much higher rate than climate change (they’re coming for your guns too!).

Everybody chill

But hold on a second. What do these numbers really tell us? First, in terms of the spoken data in COCA, global warming really is more frequent. That doesn’t account for all of the language people hear every day, but it is representative of the public discourse they are likely to hear. Only NBC used climate change more often, and even then only barely.

While we can say that the issue of climate change or global warming seems to feature more prominently on Fox News compared to CBS or ABC, we don’t really have a way of saying how these terms are used on any channel.

For that we have to look at the concordances (the passages from the texts where our search terms appear). There we can see things like Fox News’s Sean Hannity saying:

Al Gore has a financial stake in spreading global warming hysteria…
 
Al Gore’s friends in the liberal media jumped on the global warming bandwagon…
 
And finally tonight, Al Gore’ s global warming manipulation isn’t just affecting food prices…

Could it be possible that Fox News uses global warming in its scare tactics and/or liberal bashing?

We can compare this with Hannity’s use of climate change:

the University of Alaska at Fairbanks used 50,000 stimulus dollars to send 11 students to Copenhagen for the failed climate change conference…
 
Jones findings have been used for years to bolster the U.N.’s findings on climate change….

But this is probably nitpicking and it misses the larger point. The words around global warming and climate change say more about their meaning than anything else. We know how Sean Hannity feels about climate change. He says so right here:

HANNITY: Carol, I love you. You’re a great liberal. You defend your side well. If it is hot, it is global warming. If it is cold, it is global warming. If it rains, it’s global warming. If it hails, it is global warming.
 
CAROLINE HELDMAN: Gingrich and Romney are both saying that climate change is happening, are you behind them on this one?
 
HANNITY: I disagree. I don’t think the science is conclusive. Now, I do believe man has an impact on the environment. I want clean air. I want clean water. I want to leave a good planet for our kids and grandkids. But I’m not going to buy lies that are perpetrated by people […] with a political agenda.

I can’t tell if that last line was tongue in cheek, but Hannity seems to opt for another message that was in Luntz’s memo and stress that the scientific jury is still out on global warming. This has also become a conservative talking point. Obviously, the science is firmly in favor of man-made climate change, but even if we replace climate change with global warming in any of the quotes from Sean Hannity, the meaning will not change. The same goes for any of the news outlets above because the difference between these two terms is not that vast. We can all think of two terms which roughly mean the same thing, but are not interchangable in the same way that climate change and global warming are also not. (To his credit, Frank Luntz realizes the complex nature of language and his advice to President Bush on how to talk about environmental issues was nuanced and erudite.)

The idea here is to make sure not to put the cart in front of the horse. Frank Luntz advised President Bush to start using climate change instead of global warming as one way to swing the environmental issue into the Republicans’ favor. This idea would presumably trickle down to other Republicans in the government and to members of the media sympathetic to Republican views. So the first step would be to look at whether the frequency of global warming rose above that of climate change or not. Judging from the data in COCA, I would say this is not what happened. Global warming was already more common than climate change before Luntz issued his memo to President Bush, and both terms were on the rise. Luntz’s advice could certainly have been a contributing factor to climate change’s gain in usage, but it is certainly not the only one. And global warming is still more common on major American news outlets.

I don’t doubt that the terms have a difference in meaning for many people. No matter how small, there is always some semantic difference between even the closest of synonyms. These differences in meanings are based on many different factors, such as the hearer’s education, social background, nationality, familiarity with the speaker, and the context of the situation. What this boils down to is that it doesn’t matter what we call global warming. Focusing on who uses what term misses the point, even if people have more emotional reactions to one term or the other. Climate change is happening and all that matters is that we do something about it.

In the next post, I’ll do a more in depth quantitative analysis of President Bush’s use of these terms. I’ll also look at the problems with reporting Google Search statistics in research on language, which was a method employed by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication (the same project that studied people’s feelings about the terms).

The Power of Lexicographers

Joe McVeigh1 Comment

Over on Change.org, there is a petition to change the definition of marriage to “reflect the reality that there is only one kind of marriage — one between two loving adults, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.”

This petition highlights a few fascinating things about dictionaries and the power of lexicographers. There are, however, a few things to understand before we get into the harmless drudgery of what’s at stake here.

First, many dictionaries these days are written using a corpus, or a large data bank of texts. The words in the texts are tagged for their part of speech (noun, verb, etc.) to make the corpus more easily searchable. Lexicographers then use the corpora to not only help them define a word, but also (and this is key) to help them rank the different senses of each word’s definition. The more often a sense of a word is used, the higher it will be in the list. This is why Macmillan lists the “financial institution” sense of bank before the “raised area of land along the side of a river” sense.

That’s a very broad way to define what lexicographers do. If you want to know more, I recommend checking out Kory Stamper’s excellent blog, Harmless Drudgery. She is a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster and her posts are a joy to read. What’s important to know is that lexicographers try to be as impartial as possible and they use computers to help them with this. As Ms. Stamper notes in a post full of advice for budding lexicographers, “The number one rule of lexicography is you never, ever intentionally insert yourself into your defining. Your goal as a lexicographer is to write a definition that accurately and concisely conveys how a word is used without distracting the reader with humor.” Or, in this case, malice.

Second, the petition says that “Currently Dictionary.com has two separate definitions for the word marriage — one for heterosexual marriage, and one for same-sex marriage.” That’s not entirely true. Dictionary.com has at least ten definitions for marriage. What the petition is referencing is the two senses of the first definition of marriage. Here’s the screenshot:

Third, the definitions in Dictionary.com come from both “experienced lexicographers” and over fifteen “trusted and established sources including Random House and Harper Collins.” According to them, they are “the world’s largest and most authoritative online dictionary.”* The definition for marriage does not say which dictionary it is pulled from, so I think it’s safe to assume that the lexicographers at Dictionary.com wrote it. It doesn’t really matter, as this post is about lexicography as a whole.

Now that we have an idea about how dictionaries are written and what’s going on at Dictionary.com, we can see the curious nature of the petition. Dictionaries do not tell society how words are defined, rather, for the most part, it is the other way around. If you want to be pedantic about it, you could say that society and dictionaries inform each other. (Let’s not get into the whole prescriptive/descriptive nature and history of dictionary, ok?) So at first the petitioner would seem to be mistaken.

And yet, he has a point. Here’s why.

The difference between a male/female marriage and a male/male or female/female marriage is just that: plus or minus a few letters on either side of the slash mark. No dictionary would list separate senses for marriages between Caucasians and African-Americans or for those between a blue-eyed and green-eyed people, so why bother splitting the definition in terms of gender?

There is also the fact that dictionaries do have some authority. People could defend what’s currently in Dictionary.com’s definition of marriage by saying that it merely reflects the lexicographers’ research into how the word is used (which may be based on a corpus). But with over 100,000 signatures on the petition, dictionaries clearly mean more to people than just a reflection of how we use words. In fact, Stephen Colbert – no stranger to defining words – mentioned this issue on his show in 2009 when he noted that Merriam-Webster’s had included the “same-sex” sense of marriage in a 2003 update to its dictionary. When lexicographers define words, people notice (after six years).

On the other hand, 100,000 speakers of English equates to anywhere from 0.03% to 0.005% of the total population of English speakers worldwide (wildly speculative numbers based on Ethnologue’s estimate of primary speakers to Britannica’s estimate of total speakers). Either way, that’s nowhere near a majority. We should be happy the “same-sex” version of marriage is in there at all.

And then there’s the fact that native speakers do not need a dictionary to define marriage for them. If I told another native speaker over the age of fourteen that Adam and Steve got married, they would understand what I meant and, depending on their political bent, view this as, well, however they wanted to.

But this points out the dilemma that lexicographers face. In my mind, putting the “same-sex” sense of marriage second does not amount to a “brush off” or “blurb” as the petition would have us believe. I wouldn’t accuse lexicographers of doing either for any word in a dictionary, but I would assume they had a good reason to separate the two meanings; namely, the separate but similar (not equal) uses of the word. And yet, some people would take offense because the state of marriage right now is a hot button issue in the United States. Lexicographers are like referees in at least one way: someone is always going to hate them.

The lexicographers for Dictionary.com were most likely well aware that some people may take offense to how they defined marriage, but what were they supposed to do?

Here’s how some other dictionaries handled marriage:

    Macmillan left gender out of the definition, saying just “the relationship between two people who are husband and wife.”

    Merriam-Webster is in the same boat as Dictionary.com, separating the senses in a very similar way.

    The American Heritage Dictionary included the “same-sex” sense in the first sense with an explanation of it being only “in some jurisdictions”

    Oxford English Dictionary included a note to how the term is “sometimes used” today (screen shot below, since it’s behind a pay wall):

Would any of these satisfy everyone? More importantly, do we really want our lexicographers using politics to define words? Haven’t they got enough on their desks already?

Finally, it’s worth noting that the Collins Dictionary defines marriage in the first sense as “the state of being married; relation between spouses; married life; wedlock; matrimony.” It makes you wonder why Dictionary.com didn’t didn’t use that definition and call it a day.

 

 

 

*My apologies to the lexicographers and word smiths who just spit their drink all over their computer screen. That “most authoritative” part was apparently not a joke. Now, let’s all pick our jaws up off the floor and go back up to where we were.

Scandal Rocks the Kemblesville Mayor’s Office!

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

Mayor Irving’s Facebook account is hacked! Will he become the next Anthony Weiner?

Yesterday, a suspicious message was posted on Mayor Ryan F. Irving’s (I) Facebook wall. The message read:

I regret to inform you that I am stepping down as Mayor of Kemblesville.

Irving believes his account was hacked, possibly by someone from the Rick Santorum camp.

This isn’t the first time Mayor Irving has been involved in controversy. We all remember when he tried to move the Indianapolis Colts to Kemblesville in the middle of the night, his reasons being that that was how they got to Indianapolis in the first place. Then there was the scandal involving his deputy mayor, Ramona C. McVeigh, who tried to unseat him while he was in Indianapolis.

And, of course, there are those on the internet who keep removing his section from Wikipedia, claiming that it is “incomplete, unverified and poorly written.” As if that’s a reason to delete sections of Wikipedia and not the most accurate description of Wikipedia itself.

Well, as campaign manager, I can attest that everything you read on his Wikipedia contains nothing but truthiness. This article is verification of that fact. Check it out before his internet enemies strike at his Wikipedia section again.

Dear Basic Finns Party,

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

I see you have recently changed the English name of you political party to The Finns. I regret to inform you that I already have a party called The Finns. Rather than go down a messy legal road (we all have names to protect, am I right?), I’m prepared to make a deal with you. I’ll give you two options: Either you can change the name of your party or we can join forces. Once you take a look at my party’s ideals, I think you’ll choose the latter option. It may seem like our parties are totally different at first, but in fact we are quite similar.

But first, the differences. Instead of hating Muslims (like your party does), my party hates Evangelical Christians. Instead of hating blacks, my party hates whites. Instead of hating homosexuals, my party hates heterosexuals. And instead of hating non-Finnish people, my party hates only Finnish people.

I know we sound like polar opposites, but hear me out. What we have in common may be enough to bring us together. For instance, we both love xenophobia. We both love sexual orientation bashing. And we both love us some racism. The underlying connections are there. We just need to come to some kind of agreement on our union.

Allow me to suggest we compromise in a few areas. For example, you give up your Muslim-hating and I’ll let you keep that cross on your flag. Furthermore, I propose that I give up my hate of straight people, while you can continue saying that gay sex doesn’t turn you on. And finally, on the race issue, let’s agree to meet in the middle and proclaim brown-skinned people as the master race (you are familiar vit zat term, yes?)

If you find this situation agreeable to you, please let me know. My lawyers, the ravenous dogs that they are, can’t wait for their day in court. They wanted to sue you right away. But I’m a rational man. I believe that if two men can talk, bigot-to-bigot, then they’re bound to reach an amicable agreement. I’m looking forward to hearing from you. Until then, hold your heads up high. The white man shall overcome!

Regards,

Joe McVeigh

[UPDATE]: Here’s the response I got from Jussi Halla-aho, who has lots of time on his hands to respond to email as he’s serving a suspension from his party for losing the interwebs. Hey, Jussi, it’s OK. Everyone has the stupid from time to time. I’ve never advocated using tanks against protesters, but that’s just me.

Dear Joseph,

It is sad there is so much hatred in you. Our party is clearly not the best option for a person who hates so much.

Yours,

Jussi Halla-aho

Nice try! You’re getting better at this “acceptable forms of social interaction” thing. But I think what you meant to say was that “it is sad there is so much hatred in you not directed at Muslims, Greeks, other people to the north, south, east, and west of the Finnish border, etc.” Or how about, “Don’t hate the player, hate the [insert ethnic minority here]”. Now that’s a campaign slogan!

How Do You Use The Twitter?

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

Just a quick update on the people following @congressmembers, the Twitter account I started so politicians would have a safe place to send pictures of their naughty bits and avoid their own personal Weinergate.. Yes, my childish mind really started a Twitter account for that (see the post on it here). But more importantly, get a load of these dopes:

1. Michele Bachmann – It looks like Minnesota’s least favorite politician is in it for the long run – in support of a safe haven for politicians to tweet pictures of their dongs and dongettes, that is. While it is probable that Ms. Bachmann does not handle her Twitter account, it appears that someone working for her either sucks at their job or has a twisted sense of humor. I’m hoping for the latter.

Still one of my favorite emails.

2. Ted Cruz – Here’s someone from Texas who’s trying to get in the Senate. Yo Ted, are you as awful at governing as you are at twittering? Or does Michele Bachmann’s best/worst employee also monitor your Twitter account?

3. LawyersforPerry – We want the Twitter! You can’t handle the Twitter!

4. ElephantAttire* – Did you ever wish your clothes could love Jesus and America and America Jesus as much as you do? Now they can! I actually think this is a great idea and wish I had thought of it. It’s like hemp clothing for everyone between Pittsburgh and Denver. You know, Real ‘Mercans™.

5. CJTaganos – Hands down the sanest one of my followers. CJTaganos uses Twitter for its true intention – professing one’s love for Vanessa Hudgens.

It’s possible that the conservatives on this list are following me because they get the joke, but does anyone really believe that?

*@AmericanJesusClothesRUs (aka ElephantAttire) is no longer following me. Even though our Twitlationship™ was short, I’ll never forget the wonderful moments we shared. They tried to hawk some GodLovesAmerica clothes on me, I told them they’re dipshits. Alas, it was not meant to be.

Michele Bachmann Follows @congressmembers on Twitter*

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Michele Bachmann has become the first politician to jump on the @congressmembers bus. I applaud this move. It shows that she’s not afraid to take chances, be brave, and help the country move beyond Weinergate.

I am actively awaiting Michele to tweet me her twat, but until the sexual spirit moves her, why don’t you enjoy this lovely picture that appeared in my inbox today. I know I did.

I was going to update the previous post with this news, but I thought it deserved a post all on its own. Here’s hoping @SarahPalinUSA gets on board with this movement.

*Intended to be a factual statement… cause it totally is.

Introducing… @congressmembers

Joe McVeigh1 Comment

Friends, Congressmen, Countrymen,

Tweet me your dong.

I understand. You want to send people pictures of your wiener. You need to send people pictures of your ding-a-ling. But alas, not everyone wants to receive pictures of your pecker. What are you supposed to do when the pressure builds up? It’s too much for a politician to take.

That’s what I’m here for. I have created @congressmembers, a Twitter profile that promises to be a safe haven for your interwebs sexcapades. No longer will you have to worry about sending pictures of your sausage to young girls who may turn around and show them to ABC. Send them to me instead. I promise to not let anyone else see. You’ll get the release you need. No one will have to resign. And no one will have to do an interview with Meredith Vieira. And that’s what really matters.

The safe haven for pictures of wangs.

Look, as a bonafide, certified doctor. I can understand the pressure that you’re under. You’re sitting there in your office – smartphone in one hand, meat whistle in the other – and no one to share your excitement. With the Twitterverse is just a finger tap away, what’s stopping you from tweeting a picture of your winky to that cute girl who follows you? She looks reasonable. Hey, she’s in college, that’s saying something, right?

No! Don’t do it, congressman! You don’t want to go down that road. Why don’t you tweet your pork snake portfolio to me instead? It’ll stay between the two of us. Promise. Really, no questions asked. You’ll feel satisfied that your smartphone didn’t go to waste and I’ll feel satisfied that some poor, innocent college chick didn’t have to see your one-eyed warrior.

There. Now isn’t that better?

For the non-congressmen out there reading this, I’d like to take this time to note that @congressmembers is not solely for males or politicians. Hey there, Elena Kagan, gotta feed the need to show someone your Supreme bush? Deliver unto me your vaginal verdict. Why, hello, Brett Favre, upset that no one is talking about your Viking horn anymore? Throw me a long dong pass.

Look, we all know the craving. And we all know that Twitter was originally called TwouserSnake*. Think of it like homosexuality – once a sin, now a sensation. Tweeting pictures of your private parts is the same thing. You just need to wait for the rest of society to catch up. Until then, there’s always @congressmembers.

Weiner-gate solved. You’re welcome, America.

*Not intended to be a factual statement.