Geoffrey K. Pullum has weighed in with some thoughts on the recent flap over what DickC said about November 2 and getting "hit again." GKP has been reading reports on both sides of the issue, as befits the scientist, and even offered a plausible argument based on attempts to discern shades of grey that are not represented in, say, the Associated Press article that started the row. But to what end?
At the risk of disagreeing with my betters (and make no mistake: Pullum is the dOOd) I think GKP's missed the boat and helped support arguments that would wrongly let Cheney off the hook for what truly was a terrible breach of taste and conduct. The important word here is connotation. Parse however one might the denotive value of the string of words quoted in this September 12 blog post, the unmistakable connotation is that on November second, when the nation chooses between the Republican portfolio and the Democratic portfolio we are choosing between being safe or getting "hit in a way that will be devastating." Quoth Pullum:
Naturally, you trust Language Log to provide a linguistic reading that will sort this out. Did he say what AP says he said, or not?
Pullum follows with an analogy that fails to create an isomorph for the connotations hinging on the reference to the day of the election and the existence of partisan sniping aimed at winning said election. Pullum offers his Olympic doping analogy as an example of how one might argue that Dick did indeed say-and-mean what AP says Dick said-and-meant. But since this example misses the main point, fails to include isomorphs for the connotations, Pullum quite effectively undermines the argument that Cheney indeed said-and-meant what he seemed to say-and-mean. Pullum goes on to discuss an example argument that lets Dick off the hook, namely that if one is allowed to recast the statements ever so slightly then we can do away with this nasty thing of implying "a vote for Kerry is a vote for another 9/11." Now, this is indeed part of what linguists do, trying to find different ways of understanding speech acts, often by rearranging the components. But Pullum's recast removes the vital reference to the election date and the viscerally charged phrase, "get hit again." By ignoring the semantically emotive bits, the inflammatory bits, one can indeed argue that maybe poor Dicky boy just shouldn't be allowed to speak without a tele-prompter. This is a variation on the "he can't be bad, he's just dumb (or a poor orator, or trying not to have a heart attack in the middle of the campaign)" argument. This is a a dangerous argument to support, because it pre-absolves any wrongdoing without need to resort to anything so unkind as calling such people on the carpet for their wrongdoings. Basically, Pullum has given credance to the argument that Cheney is not much of a speaker and what he *meant* to say was something completely rational and appropriate and not at all partisan or inflammatory. (Yeah, Cheney; Vice-President "Fuck yourself" Cheney. Didn't mean anything inflammatory at all. Has Pullum read Newt's anachronistic answer to the linguistics of Lakoff and Rockridge?)
Rove and Gingrich and their ilk continue to use semantically powerful, emotionally charged language with forethought and malice. More than one commentator has noticed how much more comfortable GWB seems with the rhetoric of war than the nomenclature of reason. This is no mistake; votes are won by words that move, not by words that cause the listener to scratch their head and think. There is no justification for sending myself to the hospital by bending over so far backwards in effort to give a Dick Cheney or a George Bush the benefit of the doubt. There's no science in letting a viper bite you, no hedging that maybe "he didn't mean it." We are dealing with a campaign that has a long standing history of smear tactics. We are dealing with a legacy of linguistic abuse of the voters, the press, the nation. And it saddens me to see anyone cut so much as a pico-meter of slack to these miscreants.
Of perhaps more concern, and possibly worthy of a separate post, one I could clean up enough for ISR is the big "so what" on the idea that what Cheney really meant is we'll be choosing between a continued "War on Terror" and the "mere" pursuit of criminals. This is a clear issue of framing; the war on terror frames our actions in a manner that makes disagreeing with the Rove team nigh unto treason and clears the way for gradual (or not-so-gradual) erosion of civil liberties. The notion of warring on something other than a state is utter nonsense, but it's nonsense that works, from the War on Poverty (also called "the war on the poor") to the war on drugs (thank God Viagra is a "medicine") and now the war on terror, people respond. It's more of that visceral language, it's more of that powerful connotation. The rhetoric of war makes dissent an act of either treason or pussilanimous conduct; that's the clear connotation, and people respond.
I suppose since Lakoff is already beating this drum neither I nor Pullum need to. Still, it would have been nice if GKP had at least tossed a nod in that direction, had at least referred to the power of connotation in statements such as Cheney's, rather than leaving us with:
...it's back to whether you trust [Cheney's] report of his intention, or you think he's dishonestly backtracking because of the furore. Language Log cannot help you with that.
Maybe I have a naive misunderstanding of the domain of linguistics, of science. Certainly the asking of questions is of value, the finding of distinctions. But there is also value in drawing conclusions and making testable assertions. Langauge Log can indeed help with that. One place in particular Language Log might help is by pointing out the incredibly powerful signal strength of Cheney's original connotations versus the relatively weak signal of subsequent retraction. Phrased differently, if we used google as our measure of truth, what do suppose it would tell us Dick "really" said: "A vote for Kerry is a vote for Terrorism" or, as Pullum has recast it:
If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is of a future in which, when we are hit again (as some day we surely will be, perhaps devastatingly), we will fall back into the pre-9/11 mind set where we take terrorist attacks to be just criminal acts, and not appreciate that we're really at war; and that would be a terrible mistake for us.
Looking at this again, my whole rant probably hinges mostly on that damned diminutive pejorative "just." That is definitely an ISR piece in the making.
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