Linguistics professor on the "fake bubble of newsworthiness" media create out of gaffes

[highplainsdem]

https://news.brown.edu/articles/2012/10/pullum


This is from a 2012 interview with grammarian Geoff Pullum (from the intro: "Geoff Pullum is the Gerard Visiting Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown University and professor of general linguistics at the University of Edinburgh" ).

In a conversation with David Orenstein, he cited several specious analyses of word choice and syntax that have been used unfairly against candidates. The often ill-informed critiques stand in stark contrast to the way people are typically inclined to overcome the misstatements of others as they extract understanding from clumsy speech. Pullum will be listening closely to the presidential and vice presidential debates.

Are there clues in linguistics that can help us discern whether a gaffe is a matter of poor phrasing or poor thinking?

Language doesn’t usually matter all that much if you look at the intent and the actual facts of the matter, but what happens is that the press picks up on it as if it was the most important thing in the world, and you get this fake bubble of newsworthiness out of an incident that is an unremarkable and unimportant slip of speech. Sometimes it isn’t even true at all: The bubble of publicity isn’t even filled with the gas of misinterpretation, there’s just nothing there.

Everybody was always laughing at George W. Bush for his misstatements. Sometimes they were just classical malapropisms (you reach for a word and pick out the wrong one); others were slips in sentence planning, which are completely unimportant — everybody makes a few of those every day. But they just used to hunt for them in Bush’s speech.

When it comes down to it, what linguistics reveals is that people are astonishingly tolerant, adaptable, constructive, and brilliant at screening out the mistakes. It is a constructive process, not a subtraction process. To screen out the mistakes that people make in speech, you have to not just ignore some of the things that occurred, like cutting out the “ums and “ers,” you have to positively construct a sentence that does make sense. We all do that all the time; we’re not constantly laughing at our friends for disfluencies and utterances that had a second interpretation.

But then when it comes to politicians and the press, suddenly the ordinary social-psychological contract is torn up, and it’s time to catch them in errors and ridicule them and drag things out of context. And of course, much more so when it’s a campaign time and one side is looking for missteps by the candidate of the other side. That’s what you find when Barack Obama says, “You didn’t build that.”

What it sounded like he was saying is that you didn’t build your company at all. So the Republicans jumped on this and soon had an attack ad ready for TV that had Barack Obama repeating that phrase five times over — “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” But he was referring back to the other things he just said about the Internet and the freeway system and all of that. You didn’t build all that. You built your business on the basis of an infrastructure that was here already.

He was jumped on for it. That’s the way things happen.

I'd recommend reading the entire interview.

[tblue37]

1. K&R. nt

[tblue37]

2. The link just goes to the man' s staff page, not to the interview. nt

[highplainsdem]

3. Oops! Thanks for pointing that out! Just corrected it. I had both those tabs open -- still

do -- and had clicked on the wrong one to get the link.

Sigh.

Mistakes happen, but I wasn't trying to prove that by posting the wrong link.

[tblue37]

4. Thanks. I did want to read the whole interview. nt

[highplainsdem]

5. I'm so glad you caught that. I usually check the links while previewing a post, apparently forgot

to that time. Mea culpa.

I hope you'll like the interview. I'd been looking for some expert opinion on gaffes and how we react to them, and that linguist's observations seemed very helpful.

[tblue37]

6. I did enjoy reading it. nt

[highplainsdem]

9. You might like this, too:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1287233461

[cilla4progress]

7. SO

infuriating. Lazy journalism.

[highplainsdem]

13. Agree completely.

[Grampa Joe Heck]

8. So he's giving trump a pass?

What the fuck is this post doing on this site?

[highplainsdem]

10. The interrview, from 2012, does not mention Trump at all. I posted it because Biden's being

criticized here for gaffes.

[Grampa Joe Heck]

11. I understand that

But the author is giving Bush a pass for gaffes and trump is criticized for gaffes so I don't find the article constructive.

Remember Toledo!

[highplainsdem]

12. If you think Democratic opposition, or moderate Republican opposition, to Trump is based on his

gaffes, you're misreading it.

And we are NEVER going to find a candidate who NEVER suffers from slips of the tongue. Everyone does, and the more closely a candidate is scrutinized, the more apparent those slips are.