Sunday, June 21, 2009

The president's grammar

After the administration of President George W. Bush, whose syntax frequently looped around is own feet and tripped itself, it hadn’t occurred to me expect fault-finding about President Barack Obama’s discourse. But today I have this inquiry from a retired classics professor:

Our president is a talented orator, but he makes lots of grammatical mistakes. Do you know if anyone has made a collection of his solecisms and written about them?

Well, writing in City Journal in February, Benjamin Plotinsky expanded a disagreement with Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman over the acceptability of using I as a subject — as in Mr. Obama’s “a very personal decision for Michelle and I” — into a sour complaint about the press’s “adulation” of the president.

The blurring of subject and object in pronouns is quite common in speech, and it often displays a class component. I once talked regularly with a janitor whose account of what he and his wife had done invariably began Her and I. The construction between he and I is often a misguided hypercorrection among education people who fear that the objective pronouns sound a little too downmarket.

Ms. O’Conner and Mr. Kellerman are quite knowledgeable about grammar and the history of usage, and I would not be quick to dismiss their findings. Besides, the “for Michelle and I” solecism — a minor one at most — should be more excusable in speech than in formal writing. I give this one a nol-pros.

V.R. Narayanaswami addressed some of Mr. Obama’s supposed lapses in an article at Livemint.com in February, discovering more of the shopworn shibboleths that have come to characterize an unthinking prescriptivism.

One example was Mr. Obama’s description of Sen. Joe Biden as “one of the finest public servants that has served this country.” The ill-advised complaint was that that must be reserved for inanimate objects or nonhuman beings, and that who must always be used for persons. And yet, earlier today at divine service, I heard Bishop Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer language — a fetish for many language purists — repeated thus: “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord [emphasis added].”

There have also been complaints that Mr. Obama’s use of first-person pronouns has been excessive. Mark Liberman looked into this at Language Log, discovering by making an actual count of pronouns in specimen texts, that Mr. Obama has used first-person pronouns less frequently than either George W. Bush or Bill Clinton on comparable occasions. His follow-ups do not fill one with confidence that writers of columns and op-ed pieces take much trouble to confirm their assertions.

One the plus side, The Grammar Vandal diagrams one of the president’s extended sentences and finds it sound.

I am not an apologist for Mr. Obama. We have had presidents who could speak intelligibly, such as John F. Kennedy, and write exemplary English prose, such as Ulysses S. Grant. And we have had presidents who could not, such as the egregious Warren G. Harding. It seems to me that it would be better for the Republic if we focused our attention a little more on how presidents govern than on how they speak.

9 comments:

  1. V.R. Narayanaswami was bothered by the "that" but not by the "has"? Hm. I've never had any problem with these thats, but I do not like the "one of the people/birds/politicians that/who has..." construction. I believe it should be "have..."

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  2. Patricia the TerseJune 21, 2009 at 5:54 PM

    His Presidentness is a sloppy speaker - he consistently leaves off the 'g' in 'ing', mumbles some words,and occasionally erupts into some kind of Chicago slang - or so it sounds. I beg to differ that he is a strong orator, unless oratory has been confused with preaching, haranging and shouting. And without a script to keep him on the mark, he wanders back into campaign speeches. Enough of the tugging of forelocks, please.

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  3. On a vaguely related note, I have just co-written a book on the impact horse racing has had on the language. One of the areas where you most often hear phrases that originated at the track is in the coverage of political races. While we were writing "Off to a Flying Start: Horsing Around the Language" the presidential election was going on and everyday we heard many of these phrases used on the news. Here are a few "dark horse", "down to the wire", "shoo-in", "back the wrong horse", "neck and neck", and, of course, "front runner."

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  4. Hi John, You might want to know that the Grammar Vandal's post about diagramming Obama's sentences is actually a summary of an article that appeared on Huffington Post about blogger Garth Risk Hallberg, who is the one who did the actual diagramming: www.themillions.com/2009/02/diagramming-obama-sentence.html

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  5. Patricia the Terse...hmmm, you could be describing Dubya if you substituted "Texas" for "Chicago."

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  6. Patricia the TerseJune 22, 2009 at 12:46 AM

    What's a Dubya when it's at home?

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  7. While I cannot say that "Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord" is or is not an exact quotation from The Book of Common Prayer, even if it were I would call it acceptable, as prayer and Scripture, like Hebrew National hot dogs, answers to a Higher Authority.

    Retired in Elkridge

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  8. His words have meaning to his audience. And that's probably the thing that matters the most to him, his speech writers and advisors.

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  9. The President has no clue as to the usage of the articles "a" and "an". He uses them interchangeably. I'd venture to say that no one ever taught him when to use which. Just listen to him talk any day of the week; he does it all the time!

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