Presidents and the 7 deadly sins
I've been busy trying to wear out "
Speechwars" since my colleague Jim Fallows posted an
entry about it yesterday, to help us all prepare for President Obama's State-of-the-Union-equivalent speech.
The New York TImes has been busy with the same thing, to judge from the interactive graphic on its
online front page. (Sorry, I don't see how to link to the graphic itself in any permanent way.) The Times shows you the relative use over the years of all the obvious, important words, like "economy," "deficit," "jobs," and "energy."
As a sidebar to that sidebar, I thought I'd look into the presidents' relative use of the
Seven Deadly Sins. Yes, I know, it's a Catholic thing and only one of our presidents has been a Catholic. But at least the list gives us something to count.
Theodore Roosevelt is the only president ever to have used the word "lust" in a State of the Union address.
"Gluttony"and "sloth" have had no takers.
The last president to actually say "greed" was Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1954.
The word "wrath" has been used 6 times, most recently by Theodore Roosevelt in 1905. Since then, "wrath"s more contemporary synonym "anger" has been used 9 times.
"Envy" has come up 9 times, most recently in George W. Bush's 2006 address.
"Pride" has come up 109 times, in the speeches of every full-term president except Thomas Jefferson.
Shall we do the
7 heavenly virtues as well? (I'm going to use the set of them that Aurelius Clemens Prudentius popularized and that directly oppose the sins.)
"Chastity" and "temperance" each made one appearance, in the 19th century.
"Charity" had a dry spell lasting through Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush I, but otherwise has been used throughout American history.
We haven't heard about "diligence" since Woodrow Wilson, in 1914.
"Patience" has remained out of fashion since the Clinton years.
The only presidents since Calvin Coolidge to use the word "kindness" were the Bushes.
The last president to use the word "humility" was Bill Clinton, in 2000.
How curious.
If we total everything up, the sins have received 146 mentions, and the virtues 111. So much for accentuating the positive. But wait! "Pride" was mentioned far more often than any of the other qualities, good or bad. And though it's nominally a sin, the word is almost always used in a positive way.
So, what does all this tell us? Um, language is complicated?
I would like to explain ...
Comments on
my previous entry expressed doubt about the correctness of the grammar of "I would like to thank ..." when it means "I am now thanking."
Don't worry -- it's fine. By way of explanation, I've hunted up highlights from an e-mail exchange I had in 2006 with Joe Pickett, the editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, in which I asked for his thoughts on a closely related point.
Me:
Here's
a question I'm trying to answer:
Harold
Shaw, of Penobscot, Maine, writes: "Tell them to stop it! When
someone says, 'I want to thank all the little people who voted for me,' why don't
they just go ahead and do it? Say 'I thank all the little' etc., and get it
done with?"
Of course, "I want
to thank ...," meaning "I am now thanking," is perfectly
standard. (Similarly, "I want to tell you a story. Once upon a time ...")
But I don't find a relevant definition in the AHD or any other dictionary.
Doesn't seem to me that the ordinary "desire" meaning ("Used to express desire or
intent: She said she would meet us at the corner") quite
fits, because someone who says "I want to thank ..." is gratifying
the desire. The "be in need of" meaning doesn't fit either. The idea
is more nearly expressing an intention to ..., no? What am I missing?
I think this is related
to polite requests using would and like and want, rendering what are really
commands:
"Would you like to
go to the store and get me some aspirin?" "Want to go to the store
and get me some aspirin?"
I think it ostensibly
fits the "desire" meaning but is used pragmatically to mean
"please."
But let me look around a
bit.
I looked in A
Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, by Randolph Quirk, Sidney
Greenbaum, et al., and they confirm what I noted before.
As for would (I am
simplifying):
p. 233 section 4.63
discusses "tentativeness or politeness: could,
might, and would";
"Tentative Volition
(in polite requests)" e.g. in "Would you
lend me a dollar" would is more
polite than will.
As for like (again
simplifying):
p. 235 notes this:
Hypothetical would when followed by a verb such as like,
love, or prefer is used
to indicate a tentative desire in polite requests, offers, or
invitations: Would you like some tea? Thanks but I'd prefer
coffee.
While this doesn't
exactly address your reader's concern (the expression of thanks in public), the
situations seem close enough. The expression of gratitude naturally calls for
politeness and self-effacement, and so would like is
the natural choice.
While we might not be
taken aback if someone said "I thank all the people who made this movie
possible," it's just not as polite as "I would like to thank . .
."
So there you have it: would like to adds an extra tinge of politeness to what it precedes. Politeness may not be ipso facto grammatical, but it comes close.
"I would like to thank ..."
That thoroughly ordinary staple of awards ceremonies demonstrates something curious about English -- and probably many other languages too. Namely:
If you'd like to thank someone, why don't you?
Um, I just did.
In "I would like to thank...," "would like to" means "I'm doing it even as I speak." But you won't find that meaning of in dictionaries -- at least, not anywhere you can find it, in any recognizable form. I believe this is called an "implicit performative utterance" -- "performative" because the statement actually does what it refers to, and "implicit" because it doesn't do it literally and directly, the way, for instance, "I hereby thank ..." would.
There's interminable and then there's interminable
Re the March word fugitive, about a name for the "interminable" period one can spend contemplating the audiovisuals that cycle endlessly behind a DVD's main menu while one waits for someone else to come sit down, reader Tom Noe writes:
Imagine having to come up with a new name for a geologic period:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7223663.stm
Fugitives fans, don't get overexcited. Scientists have a name for the current period. They're calling it the Anthropocene.
If this has you searching your memory for the names of other geologic periods, look
here, where you'll find them together with mnemonic devices suggested by listeners to NPR's
Science Friday. My favorite is "Can Very Callous Old Senators Demand More Power and Privilege Than Junior Congressmen?" A rhetorical question, obviously.
March Word Fugitive
David K. Prince, of Lansdowne, Pa., writes, "Often my wife and I will decide to watch a DVD, and then she will delay coming to sit down, thereby subjecting me to the repeat-loop sounds and visuals of the DVD's main menu. What's the word or phrase for this interminable experience?"
Post a comment if you have an idea for the word that David Prince needs. If you hope to be quoted in The Atlantic and earn indisputable bragging rights, please sign in with your full name, and include in your post the town and state (or country) where you live.
Apostrophes, part 2
In my "
Apostrophe News" entry of a week ago, I said that I hadn't seen anyone point out that the city council of Birmingham, England, was following in the footsteps of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names when it banished apostrophes from street signs. That's because I didn't read
Michael Quinion's discussion of the flap as carefully as it deserved.
Quinion concludes:
My impression is that fashion, the real difficulties that exist in some cases, and -- particularly -- the absence of firm teaching of grammar and punctuation in school, are all leading to an accelerating decline in the correct use of the mark.
I couldn't agree more. If everybody understood the rules governing apostrophes, there would be less temptation to break them. If we didn't see the rules broken all the time, we'd find it easier to understand what the rules are, and apostrophes would be better able to do their job.
The Elements of Comics Style
Writing is awash in conventions: Start a sentence with a capital letter. End a sentence with a period, question mark, or exclamation point. Don't hyphenate after an adverb that ends in "-ly." And on and on.
All that stuff is my stock-in-trade. So I was delighted to discover (by way of reader Joel Blum, of Paris -- thanks, Joel!) that comic-book letterers have their conventions too: Point the balloon tail at the character's mouth. Use burst balloons only for screaming. Use hollow sound effects when you need impact but have serious space constraints.
If I hadn't read all the way to the end of Nate Piekos's
"Comics Grammar and Tradition" page, I would have missed wonderful information like "Old-school telepathy balloons look like a thought balloon except they have breath marks on opposing corners" and "Traditionally, whispered dialogue is indicated by a balloon with a dashed stroke. More recently accepted options are ..."
An irresistible time-waster.
Apostrophe news
Last week the city council of Birmingham, England's second largest city, decided to drop apostrophes from all local street signs. Henceforth it shall be "
St Pauls Square," "Druids Heath," "Acocks Green," and so forth. The British papers and the Associated Press have expressed outrage, ridicule, or at least amusement. (I hope the lack of an apostrophe in the AP's headline, "Its a catastrophe for the apostrophe," is meant as a little joke.)
I haven't seen anyone point out, though, that the entire United States has followed the same policy for many years. From the U.S. Board on Geographic Names' "Principles, Policies, and Procedures" governing domestic place names:
Apostrophes suggesting possession or association are not to be used within the body of a proper geographic name (Henrys Fork: not Henry's Fork).
Why is that?
The word or words that form a geographic name change their connotative function and together become a single denotative unit. They change from words having specific dictionary meaning to fixed labels used to refer to geographic entities. The need to imply possession or association no longer exists.
Say what? We aren't supposed to associate Henry (whoever he is) with his Fork (wherever that is)? Then why was it named after Henry? For that matter, if the words in place names lose their "dictionary meaning" and become "fixed labels," why are we bothering to call Henrys Fork "Fork" instead of "Henrys Mountain" or "Henrys Axolotl"? That rationale is a thoroughly silly one masquerading as linguistic science.
I can imagine banishing apostrophes from signs because they look like fly specks. I can imagine doing so for the reason that Martin Mullaney, of the Birmingham city council, gave, saying, "I had to make a final decision on this. We keep debating apostrophes in meetings and we have other things to do." What I wish I could imagine and can't, though, is that we'll put back all the apostrophes in names like "St. Paul's Square" and "Henry's Fork" that the normal rules of English call for.
