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Interrogating the politician’s ‘we’

Some languages have a different word – or different verbal morphology – for a ‘we’ that means “me and some other people, but not you” and one that means “me and you (and, perhaps, some other people.” Linguists call this distinction clusivity: the first kind of ‘we’ is inclusive, the latter exclusive.

For English speakers, on the other hand, this distinction is purely pragmatic. We can often infer it, but it’s not marked directly in our grammar. This ambiguity has rhetorical advantages: in English, the first-person plural “is sometimes used … in a way that furtively excludes, often revealing … implicit biases.”

Politicians, in particular, seem to rely on this ambiguity. Their ‘we’ sounds, at first glance, like it refers to all of us. But it so rarely does.

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On September 3rd, in a speech that used the phrase “our economy” eleven times, US President Joe Biden announced,

Our economy grew the first half of this year at the fastest rate in about 40 years. We’re the only developed country in the world — I’ll say that again — we’re the only developed country in the world whose economy is now bigger than it was before the pandemic.

But who is this ‘we’?

Does it include the 10 million Americans who are losing unemployment benefits or seeing them shrink today, Labor Day, a holiday that ostensibly celebrates the American worker? Is their economy bigger and better than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic?

What about the 15 million Americans at risk of losing their homes?

The 650,000 who have died, officially, of COVID-19 — as many Americans as died in the 1918 flu pandemic? And the hundreds of thousands more whose deaths were not counted and thus did not count? (To count: to quantify, to matter.)

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Last week my city broke its all-time 1-hour and 24-hour rainfall records. Those records were set three weeks earlier.

My life is infinitely poorer because of the millions of people I’ll never have a chance to meet because they died of COVID-19.

I’m still too angry to end this essay tidily.

We – and I do mean all of us – need collective and structural changes. We need them badly. We need them yesterday. We need them if we have any hopes of addressing climate change, ending the pandemic, or reversing the massive inequality lurking just under the surface of ‘our’ economy.

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Some new(ish) writing

I’ve been rather delinquent in updating here, but I do have a bunch of work that I’m excited to share. (If you don’t have access to something, just let me know – I’m always happy to help out!)

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Meaningful Math

“The limits of official statistics” is out in Public Anthropologies, which is American Anthropologist‘s peer-reviewed blog. I got to play with genre – and it’s one of my favorite pieces of my own writing.

A team of folks from Knology (where I work) and PBS NewsHour co-authored “Better news about math” for Numeracy. We lay out a research agenda for understanding the relationship between news and quantitative reasoning – and we’re biting off that research a little at a time, so keep an eye out for more.

Some work-in-progress from that project is available on the Knology website as an irregular series about Numbers in the News.

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Methodological Innovations

I’ve gotten to work with wonderful colleagues on methods papers that bring together various linguistic and discourse methods with survey research.

Josh Raclaw, Abby Bajuniemi, and I have an article in Discourse, Context, & Media arguing that online surveys are themselves interactions. We look at turn construction in open-ended items and some other fun stuff like that.

John Voiklis, Darcey Glasser, John Fraser, and I have an article in Journal of Pragmatics where we look at self-reference practices in survey responses about the relevance of a number of news pieces.

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Epistemic Stuff

The encyclopedia chapter on hedge words that Alex D’Arcy and I co-wrote in … *checks calendar* 2017 … is finally available.

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Special topics: shithole linguistics

A few days ago, the Republican president of the United States reportedly called a bunch of countries a shithole. And a bunch of smart people responded quickly.

Kory Stamper writes about lexicographers’ delight with swearwords end up in major publications. Dictionaries require as much written evidence as possible of usage — and swearwords are thin on the ground in written publications.

Ben Zimmer takes us through the history of shithole, with this Elizabethan gem: “Six shitten shotes did I shoote in thy mowth that I shot from my shithole.”

Others have discussed when and how newspapers decide to print swearwords rather than circumlocuting.

Are you curious how to translate shithole into other languages? Strong Language, Quartz, the Washington Post, and Newsweek all have you covered. Plus: Ancient Greek.

Maybe we could stop it with the euphemisms like vulgar and call it what it is: racist. And let’s not forget that racism is not purely an individual characteristic — this is part of “a pattern of crude, dehumanizing and racist language to describe migrants and asylum seekers that has steadily edged its way into the mainstream.”

January 16, ETA:

Lucky Ben Zimmer got to write about this twice — looking at shithouse.

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“The turn of the century”

I had to read the following paragraph three times to understand it: “There’s been interest in neural networks and analog computation and more statistical, as opposed to algorithmic, computing since at least the early 1940s, but the dominant paradigm by far was the algorithmic, rule-based paradigm— that is, up until about the turn of the century.” (Source)

That’s right, folks — people are using “the turn of the century” to mean the turn of the twenty-first century. I can’t articulate fully why I find this so strange, but I do.

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