polyglot conspiracy

George W. Bush: “Whatever It Takes…IN BED!”
John Kerry: “A Fresh Start for America…IN BED!”

An interview with Stephen Ducat on Alternet today talks to the author of The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity about America’s obsession with masculinity in politics. This subject has become painfully apparent with this election, from the accusation of Kerry as effeminately “French-like,” to who’s “manly enough” to get rid of the terrorists, to the “How ’bout those strong women in your lives, fellas?” question asked in the last debate. The Hetero-Manhood War of 2004 has been one of the most disappointing things to me about both campaigns.

This article by Katha Pollitt in The Nation and this one from Salon both get at this issue with a focus on this election. The Bush administration has a masculinity crisis, and as it relates to the current cultural crisis (a term which I maintain is not an overstatement), so do the rest of us. This is nowhere clearer than in the schtick the Kerry campaign has been trapped into using by the right’s appropriation of manhood–by the right’s intense politicization of manhood. Headlines after Kerry announced Edwards as his VP choice were nearly all framed by masculinity, whether they called them “the Sunshine Boys,” “the two Johns,” or “the Metrosexual Ticket.” We get the idea that politicians ought to be chosen for their manhood–and while all other kinds of character traits feed into masculinity (intellect, integrity, leadership, experience, etc.), they all converge to make A Man. It doesn’t matter that the Kerry/Edwards masculinity is waaaay different from the Bush/Cheney masculinity–in fact, that’s exactly the point.

In one interesting comment, Ducat says about Bush:

This is where his inarticulateness actually becomes an advantage – because in American culture, there is a disdain for intellectuality. And that disdain is a gendered disdain – men who are intellectual are seen as somehow less manly. And so if somebody speaks too well, or too articulate, his masculinity is called into question. That is why Kerry’s demeanor and facility with language has been problematic for him, while Bush’s dyslexia and inarticulateness and graceless use of language has actually been an advantage.

Makes you think twice about all those Bushisms, doesn’t it? Though I immediately do a double-take at this comment because women, too, haven’t traditionally been wanted to be intellectual [note: can we talk about why we're scared of intellect in general?], I think he’s right in the case of Bush. As Ron Suskind’s illuminating NYT Magazine piece (which you can get here) explains:

And for those who don’t get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. “You think he’s an idiot, don’t you?” I said, no, I didn’t. “No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don’t care. You see, you’re outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don’t read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it’s good for us. Because you know what those folks don’t like? They don’t like you!”

The only people who really care about Bush’s slip-ups are people like me and other linguisticians, who just think that kind of stuff is hi-lariously fun to dissect, and people like Jacob Weisberg, who make commentary via Bush’s self-incriminating quotes. And who are we? We’re the ones flaunting our intellectuality. And you know what that makes us? Effete.

I once wrote this in another forum:

I was just joking to myself about how I wish Kerry/Edwards had a really strong feminist on their ‘image’ team, which might prevent some of this excessively masculine posturing. Then I thought, “Wait, didn’t Gore try that? Oh yes, Gore had Naomi Wolf…..oh…..right.” Riiiiiight.

But Ducat’s comments make clear that this goes above and beyond “style,” and it’s one with deep implications for women in politics. And other minorities, for that matter, whose masculinities might be stereotypically (or really) different from the middle-aged, upper-class white guys. One also can’t help but wonder whether politicians are missing out on a lot of voters who might not mind a little less machismo; after all, aren’t the single women supposed to be this year’s Overgeneralized Demographic Vote to Win? They could try this for a campaign slogan: “We’ve waited 216 years for a feminine president. Now is the time. Vote Kerry!”

I point your attention to Geoffrey Pullum’s hilarious post on Language Log about the international origins of email spam. An excerpt:

Putative friends and allies like the U.K. appear to rank as more evil than known enemies like France. (Just kidding! A hearty welcome to all our French readers!) Tiny Latvia and Lithuania are in on the act along with huge countries like Brazil and Australia. Poor countries like Guatemala and rich countries like Japan are cheek by jowl.

Along with the quip that there should be a .evil suffix for all spammers, here’s something more serious to consider: as Pullum points out, you can’t know for sure where your spam is coming from since most use .com or .net addresses, with no national affiliation (Pullum’s analysis draws from the country suffixes on email addresses, like .nu for Nieue [The Rock of Polynesia, apparently]). Yet if I asked you where a particular .com or .net address was coming from, you would undoubtedly say the US. We consider these suffixes as American by default–who actually uses .us (grouphug excluded)?

I’ve been reading (and writing[self-reprimand: Stop blogging, fool! Get back to your paper!]) too much lately about things being in “marked/unmarked” oppositions not to offer comment here that .com and .net — and .org, though who sends spam from .org? that would be so counterintuitive — are the unmarked internet domain suffixes. Technically, my .net address doesn’t mark my site as being from any particular place, but your .de certainly does (that’s Germany). But you’re going to assume that my .net will be from America. But still, this makes my .net “normal” and your .de some kind of “novel.” At least, on this side of the internets it does.

I know nothing about the politics of internet domaining, but this feels a bit wrongly, if unsurprisingly, US-centric (America-centric? Americentric?). Why do we get to claim the .com and the .net, without having to use our country suffix? (Don’t we get the .edu, too? Schools from other countries always have the country code after them.) Is this going to start changing as more people from not-America use .com and .net? What’s the motivation for choosing a marked country suffix vs. an unmarked non-country one? Just like choosing IM or email screen names, this could be a fascinating study in online identity construction/management (who can send me a link?).

This book looks nice (via Alternet).

I am so tired of writing the phrase word order. My typing fingers get confused while writing the first o-r-d as to whether I’m in fact writing the first o-r-d or am already at the stage of the second o-r-d. Thus, I propose we just conflate these terms into worder, pronounced like order but with W. Though it does sound like warder, at least it won’t sound like “one who words,” which is actually a word, though an old-school one [OED]:

One who uses (many) words; a chatterer, prater. Obs.

We have better names for “warders,” anyway. Seriously, guys. This would make my life so much simpler.

While reading (appropriately, as you’ll see) my history of English textbook yesterday, I came across the word in-migrants. The (British) author used the term to describe the adults who’d moved to a newish town in England from elsewhere; and, as the word’s meaning indicates, specifically from elsewhere in England. Webster’s says in-migrate is of American 1940s origin, meaning “to move or settle into a different part of one’s country or home territory.” What? An American word that describes a common practice, yet I’ve never heard of it? Something fishy must have happened to this word.

The OED gives a similar definition as M-W:

The action of moving from one place to another within the same country, e.g. from one state to another in the United States.

It pinpoints the origin to 1942 and gives this later but particularly illustrative quote:

1957 Economist 28 Sept. 1031/1 Nowadays, with the tide of immigration from Europe a fading memory, American cities are growing by grace of what sociologists call ‘in-migration’-movements of people from other parts of the United States.

Both M-W and the OED oppose the term to out-migration. From the OED:

To leave one country or place to make one’s home in another. Hence outmigration

Now, that’s curious: there’s nothing in that definition that really distinguishes it from emigration or immigration. To be parallel to in-migration, wouldn’t the movement need something to do with a more specific locale? AmHeritage offers no clarification when it defines out-migrate as simply moving out of one’s country or territory, yet restricts the meaning of in-migrate to within the confines of one’s own country or territory. M-W defines out-migration as “to leave a region, community, etc., and settle in a different part of one’s country.” Well in that case, it’s the same thing as in-migration! They just express the same concept from a different focus.

In fact, Columbia Guide makes no distinction among most terms with -migra- in the middle, claiming that in-migrants and out-migrants are just different ways of focusing on the issue of em/immigration:

Creation of in-migration and out-migration (and in-migrant, out-migrant, in-migrate, and out-migrate) may in part have been an effort to avoid possible confusion, but these words also have an advantage if you intend to concentrate solely on the effects of migrations on a single place, keeping track of who enters and who leaves but paying no immediate attention to where the in-migrants come from or where the out-migrants go. All these terms are Standard, although in-migrate and out-migrate and their other forms are only about fifty years old.

This definition, we see, collides head-on with the definition given in the other two sources: in-migration does nothing BUT pay “immediate attention to where the in-migrants come from” and go (same to be said for out-migration in M-W’s definition).

Numerous combinations of googlefights between variants of in- and out-migration have out-migration winning, hands down, every time. So I’m thinking that someone thought of the quite useful term in-migration to describe a demographic phenomenon (though I’m kind of surprised it didn’t come out as intra-migration), then perhaps the term out-migration was coined as a negative corollary (though kind of an unnecessary one), which in turn has proved itself more useful than the first term. Out-migration lets us focus specifically on the leaving, not on the settling or the coming; what place you’re out-migrating to is irrelevant. And in fact, most Ghits I found for out-migration have to do with the leaving of people from a country, which implies that they’re going to a different country (as opposed to the original meaning).

But a concluding note here about “usefulness”: I’m an in-migrant, and so are most of my friends and much of my family. Now that the young’uns these days (Urban Tribes, 30s are the new 20s, etc etc) are all so highly mobile, could this word make a comeback? What do we think? Has anyone actually heard this word? (FYI, most of the Ghits for “in-migrate” seem to be really “in migrate,” and “inmigrate” gets typos for “immigrate.”)

The obligatory:

Wherever you go There you are

By now Bush’s misspeak about the Internets is old news. But what’s interesting about this particular Bushism is that it actually got people thinking and talking about what “Internet” even means, and whether it can be plural after all. Most people seem to agree that it can’t, unless you count a few techie book titles here and there; the consensus seems to be that we really don’t have Internets–sure, there are a number of networks connected by the Internet, and you can have private intranets, but the Internet is the Internet is the Internet. Collective. One thing. One big ol’ unified thing, with a definite article and a capital I.

Oops! Signs point to the word’s capitalization being on its way out. Back in August, Wired announced its decision to lower the case of “internet”:

[I]n the case of internet, web and net, a change in our house style was necessary to put into perspective what the internet is: another medium for delivering and receiving information. That it transformed human communication is beyond dispute. But no more so than moveable type did in its day. Or the radio. Or television.

I had a surprising experience the other day when I filled out a survey for the Pew Internet and American Life Project that never capitalized internet. At Pew, it seems that any report after August use the lowercase form, while reports before August capitalize the word. Geoff Nunberg argues that de-capitalization, while facing a hard road to common usage, reveals much about our conceptualization of the medium:

The real reason people insist on capitalizing the words is that they like to think of them on the model of other common nouns that have been elevated to the proper names of specific places like the Shire, the Channel and the Coast…That picture of the Internet owes something to our propensity for conceiving of the medium in a spatial way…The capital letter turns the Internet into a specific locale — not a physical place, of course, but a social one.

But, as Nunberg goes on to say, there isn’t really an “out there out there” on the internet; it’s not a place, and it’s certainly not a unity by anything but very technical standards. Easing up on the capitalization is probably the first step to recognizing that we all have different experiences with the internet, that it facilitates myriad activities. Maybe the plural “internets” is the next step in referring to what it really is: a vast, varied well of experiences that are individually constructed for each user by herself.

The analogy to de-capitalization of the Cinema, the Radio, and other media forms is an instructive one here. True, we don’t refer to “cinemas” or “radios,” though we do refer to “the movies.” We have radio and TV stations, and I guess in a similar way there are internet websites, so from that it follows that it doesn’t make sense to pluralize internets. But I think an argument can be made that for more than any other media form, there really are multiple internets possible from a user’s perspective. My internet is not the same as yours: we “visit” different “places” every day, we create our own online routines, extracting different combinations of words, images, sounds, and interaction. So while from the technical side there may still be only one Internet, capital letter definite article, from users’ perspectives there exist multiple internets, lowercase plural. This satire piece illustrates it (by way of other good points).

I’m worried about the internets. Right now, people are using the term tongue-in-cheek to make fun of Bush while the material’s fresh (see the bottom of this Language Log post, and Pandagon’s browser header). But it seems like one of those words that could start off with a jocose usage then transform to a serious one (like how I used to only use “dude” as a joke and it’s now an integral part of my lexicon!), particularly if people really start to rethink and reconceptualize what internet means, as is clearly happening, with language/style as evidence. I’m not boldly predicting this to happen per se, I’m just saying that I’ll be OK with talking about internets if we end up talking about them. So why am I worried? Because I just don’t want W. to get credit for it in the OED!

Thanks to Chris for this one:

Work is the price you pay for money

Here in C’Ville, a smallish town with no standardized taxi system (or other good public transit, for that matter), some weird tradition has evolved wherein taxi drivers are obliged to slap clever little axioms onto the back, front, side, or top of their automobiles. I will try to get to the bottom of this practice (has anyone seen this so widespread in any other town?), but in the meantime I’ll start posting all the cute and not-so-cute shibboleths, aphorisms, and admonitions I see, some of which will probably be grounds for analyses/discussion. If you live in C’Ville, email me with contributions that you witness.

Today’s sighting:

To belittle is to be little

NPR’s Talk of the Nation host Neil Conan produced a strikingly witty response to comedian Steve Martin’s misspeak on today’s show. A caller asked about Martin’s banjo playing, which got him talking about an award he sort of won:

Martin: …I won a grammar, er, a Grammy, for “Best Country Instrumentalist”…
[talk about faux Grammy award, caller loving the banjo, etc. etc.]
Conan: …You also did win a Grammar Award there, for “Best Comedy Syntax.”
[crosstalk]
Martin: Huh huh, thank you…
[crosstalk]
Martin: I wish I could win a Grammar Award.

I bet George Bush does, too.