Richard Ford was on NPR this morning to read from his new novel, an excerpt that had the word "ass" in it (something like, "people standing up to their ass in water"). Which I have no problem with, except: It was 8 am and they were saying "ass" on NPR.

Why not believe anything? It is as if I decided to build a birdhouse, but couldn’t predict, before I finished it, whether it was actually a supersonic automobile.

Limited Inc. always rises above the white noise, but he outdoes himself here.

These are four language-related election stories that could have been written -- four reasons why language in America should get its own beat.

1. Kerry's "gaffe" had signs of a botched preparation, and no signs of botched delivery. Experts on error in language would weigh in.

2. Voting rights and languages other than English. Did polls have bilingual workers? Who were they, where do they come from?

3. What language agenda would a Democratic Congress have? English Only would be off the table; expansion of spending on non-English federal services?

4. Bilingual political messages & who makes them -- up and coming political consultants and the rise of ethnic media. Here in Texas, it would be Hubert Vo, the first Vietnamese-American elected to the state House.

Some of these might have been done locally; if so, I haven't seen them. But they're nationally important: voting rights, language attitudes, demographic shifts toward bilinguals and non-native English speakers. Reported local examples should inform a portrait with national implications.

Hindi wants on the "next world language" bandwagon with Mandarin:

New Delhi, August 19, 2006

India has said that Hindi should be included as one of the languages used
by the United Nations as it was spoken by a substantial percentage of the
world population. Minister of State for External Affairs Anand Sharma said
that an international Hindi conference would be held in New York early
next year as part of efforts to popularise further the language in the
world arena.

Wikipedia says there are 400 million speakers of Hindi. However, we know that "world language status" isn't solely a matter of the number of speakers.

Hindi and Urdu are very similar and mutually intelligible, though they're different sociopolitically. (Another similar pair is Norwegian/Swedish; for more on language taxonomy, at least see my piece on Ethnologue here.) But I doubt Urdu will get world language status, too -- for all that Pakistan might be, India is the new superpower.

Feather Larson & Synhors, the company that put together anti-immigrant campaign phone calls in Indiana, promises voices with "neutral" accents. Representative Mark Souder has complained that voices on calls for his campaign in Indiana were so thickly accented, he couldn't understand them.

This from the Hill:

According to the United Press International, Souder complained about campaign calls made on his behalf after listening to a message left on his sister’s answering machine in which the only word he understood was “Hayhurst,” the last name of his Democratic challenger, Tom Hayhurst.

But why consider this a screw-up? What if had been a conscious rhetorical choice? You could really drive an anti-immigrant message home by annoying listeners with non-native English voices -- just as you could pump up your anti-gay marriage ads with stereotypically "gay" voices. (Note: I'm not advocating this; I'm just pointing out that "neutral" media accents may make a message more intelligible but still cripple it by stripping out its emotional provocation. Too bad this principle gets used too often in negative ways: yeehaw voices for truck commercials, etc.)

However, the Hill account only says that Souder complained of "foreign" accents. What does that mean? That the speakers come from Mumbai or the North End of Boston? Could be either. Or both.

Given the all-encompassing xenophobic tenor of anti-immigration attitudes, I say both.

Snippet of a soon-to-be published book that will remain unpublished:

In such a survey you’d inevitably read about American presidents as orators, and how few of them were renowned for their eloquence or verbal skill. James Madison, the fourth president, was well-educated, but he disliked making speeches and had a “weak” and “unexciting” voice; he preferred to write, and his long, complicated sentences showed it. Andrew Jackson was a rustic who spoke with an Irish accent and often sprayed his listeners with saliva. Abraham Lincoln spoke with a country accent (he was from rural southern Illinois) and spent much of his presidency bowing out of public speaking, less because he felt uncomfortable than because, as he said once, “every word is so closely noted that it will not do to make trivial ones.” Theodore Roosevelt, who became known as a forceful orator, started out clumsily in the New York State Legislature, and Herbert Hoover, painfully shy, with a wobbly voice, hated public speaking.

Personally, I prefer Henry, but I loved this anecdote. Unfortunately my editor did not agree.

In this genre I would also have to include a remark by John Quincy Adams in a moment of self-criticism so charming that it will console mumblers, blunderers, tongue-tanglers, hesitaters and embolaliasts everywhere. You should first know that Adams, the sixth American president, mastered seven languages, gave a weekly lecture in 1808 at Harvard on rhetoric (while serving as a senator from Massachusetts), and studied his books from dawn until late at night throughout his life. Known to his contemporaries as “Old Man Eloquent,” Adams (who was then a senator), wrote this in his journal in 1804:

“On this occasion, as on almost every other,” (we don’t know what the occasion was), “I felt most sensibly my deficiency as an extemporaneous speaker.

“In tracing this deficiency to its source, I find it arising from a cause that is irreparable. No efforts, no application on my part, can ever remove it.”

There’s no doubt that Adams’ educational achievements were more typical of American men of his rank at the end of the 18th century. He translated Aristotle from the Greek and read Cicero and Quintilian in French, English, and Latin. He read Demosthenes, Isaeus, Aeschines, Isocrates, all the models of eloquence in Homer, Thucydides, Sallust, and Livy, and the biographies of orators in Suetonius and Plutarch. At the age of 15, because of his excellent spoken French, he became a diplomat to France. In another diary entry, Adams wrote that if he were smarter, his diary would be, next to the Bible, “the most precious and valuable book ever written by human hands.” Not known for his modesty, he wasn’t known as an orator, either: his voice was dignified but shrill and sometimes piercing.

In the journal excerpt, Old Man Eloquent continued: “It is slowness of comprehension – an incapacity to grasp the whole compass of a subject in the mind at once with such an arrangement as leaves a proper impression of the detail – and incapacity to form ideas properly precise and definite with the rapidity necessary to give them uninterrupted utterance.”

I know exactly what you mean! I thought.

“My manner, therefore, is slow, hesitating and often confused. Sometimes, from inability to furnish the words to finish a thought commenced, I begin a sentence with propriety and end it with nonsense.”

In 1995, Gerald Fabris, the curator of the Edison National Historic Site, discovered a wax cylinder among 43 other recordings that were being catalogued, preserved, and re-recorded. Fabris has concluded that the voice on the cylinder is Edison's. This was remarkable because no recordings of Edison's voice that predated 1906 were thought to exist. Because Edison disliked his voice, he usually destroyed test recordings by scraping the wax off the cylinder.

Fabris sent me a conference paper in which he presented his case, which seemed convincing. Not everyone agrees that the voice is Edison's, however. That's all I can tell you about the controversy, until I get some time to research more fully.

Also an excerpt:

A 1939 etiquette book, The Correct Thing, a Guide Book of Etiquette for Young Men, by William Oliver Stevens, advocated that the proper young man “avoid monotony. Change pitch and tempo for variety. A slow steady drawl on one pitch will put any audience to sleep.” Stevens pointed out an even worse offense: “Tagging ‘uh’ after your words – ‘and uh…but uh’ – which is maddening to have to endure.”

In Schafer’s books, each blooper has the hermetic feel of a Reader’s Digest anecdote, where the reader gets only enough context to set up the joke before the joke itself is delivered, and there’s no time for analysis of the aftermath, because another joke is already being set up. “Wire service typos are very often responsible for newscasters goofs, especially when news is read ‘cold’ right off the ticker,” Schafer wrote. “Here is an example of a newsman’s reading an Associated Press news item that was handed to him while he was on the air an which was broadcast over KFRB, Alaska. ‘A secretary who humped her boss caused more than five thousand dollars in damage…Er, I’m sure they must have meant “bumped into her boss”!’”

As Erving Goffman pointed out, during the course of a normal day, we hear many speech faults, but not all of them get labeled as faultables. Why do we notice when broadcasters do them? Because you’re listening more intently, even aggressively. It’s a way of knocking the speaker down a notch. The speaker doesn’t have the only active role in mass media; the viewer and the listener are active as well.

“During one of Steve Allen’s shows,” Schafer wrote, “he kept substituting the word ‘dingdong’ for other words. He had on this particular show a culinary expert to whom Steve said, ‘The way to a man’s heart is through his dingdong.’” In his theme song, “Blooper Man,” Schafer wrote that “On radio and tv/or just little old you and me/bloopers will always be.” He insisted that bloopers weren’t vulgar or meant to prey on the hapless, and a credit dedicates the movie as “a sympathetic tribute to members of the broadcasting industry who have been the victims of these classic bloopers.” Yet his movie opens with a lounge act-sounding song with the taunting refrain: “You blew it, you blew it, you blew it, you blew it.”

So I'm turning on comments so that visitors can tag.

While the rest of the langblog world goes after Microsoft vs. Mapuche (here, here, and here), I have my head in speaking in tongues and the controversy roiling the Southern Baptist Convention.

I went to Arlington over the weekend to visit a few churches and, though I didn't hear any tongues, I did meet a few people who do. One was an Assembly of God missionary in Swaziland back in the US for a visit. He mentioned that in the field, they often encounter folk religions with a similar sort of ecstatic utterance which they label as counterfeit. I asked if they explicitly teach the difference between "real" tongues and "counterfeit" tongues, and he said they focus on modeling "real" tongues and let the counterfeit be labeled or fall away. At the beginning of his stay he was at a service where someone was speaking in tongues, which someone near him pointed out as counterfeit. He could hear that it wasn't Christian tongues.
Glossolalic dialectology, anyone?

I also saw how tongues can happen. The music is swelling; people around you are murmuring, clapping, raising their hands; perhaps you're on your knees at an altar call. The music goes on; the preacher's exhortations rise and fall. In your trance state you begin vocalizing automatically, just as you're swaying or clapping without really intending to.

And it made me think of my parents, who attended a Catholic charismatic prayer group in the early 1970s and towed me and my sister along. They had just moved to Pueblo, Colorado, and wanted to meet people, so at the recommendation of a nun who was a nurse at the local hospital (Sister Bea, a white-haired, pudgy woman whom we looked forward to seeing because she'd always buy us soft-serve ice cream in the hospital cafeteria), they attended. I don't remember how many prayer meetings we went to, though I remember people speaking in tongues and laying on hands for healing. Perhaps even I was the object of healing, I don't know.

On the drive back I asked my mother if she'd ever spoken in tongues, and she said that at one of those meetings she discovered herself saying a word that made her feel at peace. Years later she still says the word. She say she told it to my sister when my sister was in Africa, who translated what it meant in Arabic, though my sister didn't remember doing so. My mother remembered that the translation was something like "God is good."

A 2005 Baylor Religion Survey found that only 5.6% of the respondents had spoken in tongues, which puts my mother in limited company. (I haven't spoken to my father yet.) I don't often do a story that has such a personal angle, though it did make me realize I've never mined my religious upbringing in writing. If I did it would have be titled American Apostate.

I don't know. I'm working on it.

I love journalism for the way a vast, unyielding surface of facts, personalities, and situations becomes, in time, a softer, less opaque volume. It's akin to repeating arcane ritual gestures that make a solid wall become an undulating membrane. And then in an instant, finding that one has passed through the membrane without rupture to the other side, at that point where I develop intuitions about what I hear and see.

Then, when you finish a story, you come back through the membrane, which slowly seals itself up and hardens. It's like dying a little.

A couple from Lewis Hyde, The Gift:

"Academic freedom," as the term is used in the debate over commercial science, refers to the freedom of ideas, not to the freedom of individuals.

Ideas do not circulate freely when they are treated as commodities.

When all property is privatized, faith is privatized and all men feel fear at the boundary of the self.

Bondage to our gifts (and to the teachers who wake them) diminishes as we become empowered to pass them along.