You know, I just got done telling you (close) readers that I've never been interested in any sort of leadership position. I'm the independent individualist type. I'm all about autonomy, not making everybody else's problems my problems.
And I don't do elaborate charts with numbers, so I don't know what Language Log is talking about. I'm into language.... log.
There was someone in the back of the theater with a loud and infectious laugh, who didn't laugh at any of the obviously funny lines, but instead laughed — maybe a hundred times — at a selection of lines that is not easy to characterize....
The laugher's interventions mostly seemed to me to be points where a character changed the subject, or said something that was unexpected in the context of the previous discourse, or said or did something awkward or socially uneasy....
But there were other theories. One person thought that the laugher might have been a friend of a couple of the actors, who reacted whenever one of them entered the on-stage conversation. Another theory was that the laugher was reacting when the actors made certain expressive faces. These are obviously overlapping theories, and many others might be devised as well.
In the comments, Richard Bell said:
Is it possible this laugher was the one person who best understood and reacted to Chekhov's special comic gift? What you have suggested is, in fact, a pretty good description of Chekhovian comedy. His characters don't really listen to each other. Someone once said there is no dialogue in Chekhov; only interrupted monologues. They change the subject because they don't know what the subject is; they have not been listening.
Now, Liberman says the laugh leader was "loud" and goes on to describe the actors seemingly reacting negatively to the laughing. So, it seems as though the laughing was bad in some special way that makes Bell's comment an incomplete response.
But I am very interested in laugh leading. When I go to the movies or a play, I find that I myself am a laugh leader. It don't laugh loudly, but I am the first person to laugh at a lot of things, and I get other people laughing. I'm not trying to go first. It's just that a lot of Americans — especially at high-art type movies and plays — are too polite or insecure about laughing. They'll sit there silently while all sorts of subtly funny things are happening as if they need to laugh lines and broad comedy to give them confidence. People seem to be unsure of their own perceptions or just numbed to nonobvious comedy.
A good laugh leader can lubricate the audience and intensify the pleasure of witnessing a performance with others. Of course, a bad laugh leader is a problem, especially if there are live actors on stage. But it's that fear of laughing first and laughing wrongly that holds so many people back and puts a premium on good laugh leading.
Yesterday, we were talking about the Flickr page set up to collect photographs of Tea Party signs with grammar and spelling errors. The page is called "Teabonics," a term intended to express how stupid Tea Partiers are. But the coinage "Teabonics" is a play on "Ebonics." The word "Ebonics" isn't supposed to make fun of mistakes made by black people. It embodies the claim that speech that may sound nonstandard is, in fact, a language with its own grammar, that may be studied and learned.
Working on this post, I saw that Language Log had written about "Teabonics," and I assumed I would get some good analysis about the misuse of "Ebonics" in coining the new word. But here's what I found:
Including some nice examples of Muphry's Law in action....
Muphry's Law? Muphry's Law? Ha! Hang on a second, I need to recover from deep pangs of irony. Mock spelling, and you'd better make sure you never ever ever ever ever make a typo.
It takes more than 2 hours before anyone shows up on the popular linguistics blog to take Liberman to task for failing to see the swipe at black people:
Elizabeth Herrington said, March 31, 2010 @ 8:47 pm
This is funny, sure. But we need to remember Ebonics (inglorious word it be) is based on a grammar. Teabonics is just plain ignorance.
***
Lance said, March 31, 2010 @ 9:07 pm
... I'm sort of sorry that LanguageLog is propagating this. The common tagline is that "linguists are calling [this] Teabonics"; except that, as Elizabeth Herrington says above, recognizing Ebonics is deeply rooted in linguistic concepts, whereas this is just making fun of misspelling. And while I'm in favor politically of making fun of tea-partiers, I'm professionally against calling it "Teabonics", which elevates this to actual academic study and debases Ebonics as being equivalently illiterate.
So, why the blindness to racism? I suspect that it is a combination of the conventional liberal self-love — the mind-dulling confidence that they are the good people — and the embarrassing secret that the study of Ebonics was never truly grounded in respect for black people.
CORRECTION: "Muphry's Law," spelled like that, is something that has been talked about in the past on Language Log. Liberman's writing "Muphry's Law" would be an example of Muphry's Law if the term "Muphry's Law" hadn't been coined to refer to things like that. Thanks to the commenter Dewb for pointing this out.
Rush played a clip of Obama pronouncing the word "ask" "ax" and made a joking reference to the recently revealed embarrassing statement by Harry Reid, that Obama could win the election because he's "light-skinned" and speaks "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." Obama's use of "ax" was in all probability a mere slip, but to anyone who remembered the Reid statement and who also enjoys exposure of the Democrats' exploitation of race, it was very funny to imagine that Obama made a deliberate choice to affect what Reid called a "Negro dialect."
It was satire.
Now, I'm not saying it was the funniest comic riff in the world. And I'm sure it disturbs those who want to be super-polite about race and, even more, those who — like Hertzberg — want to characterize the Democrats as the good guys about race and people like Rush as the bad guys. Hertzberg therefore recounted the incident leaving out the reference to Harry Reid's remark, so that the humor was hard to see and it looked more like mean-spirited race-baiting. That was totally underhanded and dishonest — unless, as I said, Hertzberg was too dumb to get it. Remember, Hertzberg took the strong position — in The New Yorker — that Rush is nothing but a big hateful racist. So the issue wasn't whether the joke was excellent. The issue is what Rush's statement means about whether he really is a terrible racist. I think my post makes it clear that he is not, and Hertzberg is either stupid or dishonest.
Liberman comes to Hertzberg's defense by calling my post "bizarre," but Liberman only quotes a small bit of what I said, and he leaves out the whole substance of my point. (Did he really not get it or did he omit the context to support his representation of it as "bizarre"?) Liberman doesn't let his readers see how Reid's remark was the basis for understanding why it was funny (or supposed to be funny) to point out that Obama said "ax."
Instead, Liberman tries to make a point by quoting a Pandagon blogger who insulted me long ago, as if that was as relevant to the discussion as Rush's reference to Harry Reid. But it's not. It's just an insult of me, which of course, repeated for no ostensible reason, would be correctly interpreted as a way to insult me and be able to try — lamely — to deny it. Liberman is right about his quoting Pandagon, but the analogy to Rush and Reid is inapt. Liberman says:
You can't defend a false characterization of someone's motivations or actions by noting that the attack was a paraphrase of a third party's remarks, especially if your reference is completely out of context.
Remember, the issue is whether it is fair to characterize Limbaugh as a racist and whether leaving out the reference to Reid dishonestly skews readers to interpret the remark as racist. To understand Limbaugh as a satirist of Democrats, rather than someone who hates (or even disrespects) black people, you need to know that he's riffing on something the Democrat Reid said about the way his Party could exploit its black candidate. (Reid was assuming that white voters are racist, but that a black candidate could succeed if he looked and spoke less like some black stereotype Reid expected those who heard his statement to share.) Thus, what was "completely out of context" was Hertzberg's presentation of Rush's remark without the material that allowed us to see it as a critique of the Democratic Party's racial strategies.
The issue is not whether Rush made "a false characterization of [Obama]'s motivation" for saying "ax." That was all a comic riff that you can think is funny or not. So, we don't really know why Obama said "ax," but Rush didn't make a "false characterization" of why Obama said it. We don't really know why Obama said it. I assume it was a simple mistake, and I bet Rush does too. But it was satire to invite us to imagine that this was Obama doing that thing Reid said he could do. Again, you may think it was poor satire, but the issue is whether it is fair to characterize Limbaugh as a racist, and the answer is no.
Liberman needs to take another look at all this and concentrate on what matters. Not why did Obama say "ax," but: Was it fair for Hertzberg to call Limbaugh a racist?
Certainly, in blogging, we say "X said" to mean "X wrote." And I see that I just said "we say" to mean "we write"... And I just said "I just said" to mean...
Oh, enough! Let me say instead that I didn't even bother to blog the Maureen Dowd "plagiarism" story (until now) because I don't consider that kind of thing serious plagiarism. It's sloppy and embarrassing, but it's completely unintentional and not a deliberate effort to pass off someone else's writing as one's own.
It was dull prose, not an eloquent phrasing or snappy quip. So this was was the sort of faux-plagiarism that constantly threatens all of us in these days of quick cutting and pasting. You think you know what is a quote when you're compiling your notes, but maybe later you see it and think it's yours.
Now, I like to believe I'll remember what blocks of text I dropped into my documents, and if I'm not too rushed or I think I might forget, I put quote marks or indentations to remind me what's not mine. Also, I think if I look back on something that I didn't write, I'll recognize that it's not my style.
But it's possible to slip up, and what Dowd did looks like exactly the sort of thing that can only be a slip.
The real fault is not making it a point always to write sharp, distinctive prose. Prose like the stuff Dowd lifted called out for rewriting. She might not have known to think I can't use that because I didn't write it. But should should at least have thought I can't use that because it's dull.
It's sad, because Dowd tends to err in the other direction — rewriting things into the snappiest possible prose. That quirk should have saved her from this slip. It didn't this time. She's been embarrassed. That's all.
A warning about the poem’s language preceded the airing, as a series of offensive words including “nigger” and “spastic” were employed.
Here in America — where we have Elvis energy, apparently — those 2 words are on completely different levels of offensiveness, but I guess that's the way they talk in Britain, where, presumably, "spastic" is not a word to be used casually.
Ah, now it's coming back to me. Remember back in 2006, when Tiger Woods got into trouble for casually saying "spaz" in Britain? Language Log had a great post titled "A Brief History of Spaz":
[T]he clumsy or inept meaning of spaz remained mostly on the playground until the late 1970s, when it began seeping into American popular culture. In 1978, Saturday Night Live started running occasional sketches starring "The Nerds," with Bill Murray as Todd DiLamuca and Gilda Radner as Lisa Loopner. On two shows that year (Apr. 22 and Nov. 4), host Steve Martin joined in, playing the character Charles Knerlman, or "Chaz the Spaz" as he was known to Todd and Lisa.... A year after the SNL sketches in 1979, Bill Murray starred in the summer-camp comedy Meatballs, which featured a stereotypically nerdy character played by Jack Blum called "Spaz."
For someone like Tiger Woods who came of age in the '80s (and who, incidentally, is on record as saying that another Bill Murray movie, Caddyshack, is his all-time favorite), the American usage of spaz had long lost any resonance it might have had with the epithet spastic. This is not the case in Great Britain, however, where both spastic and spaz evidently remain in active usage as derogatory terms for people with cerebral palsy or other disabilities affecting motor coordination. A BBC survey ranked spastic as the second-most offensive term for disabled people, just below retard....
