George Will’s columns follow a meandering path, one littered with scurrilous non-arguments and veiled references. The voyage provides nothing so much as a vague sense of unease. When he finally reaches his intended target, I guess his strategy is to taint it by association with what comes before so that he doesn’t need to use actual arguments.
This Sunday morning sees Mr. Will in fine form, with an offering titled “Have We Got a Deal For You.” He opens with this claim about the qualities of President Obama’s language use:
“I,” said the president, who is inordinately fond of the first-person singular pronoun, “want to disabuse people of this notion that somehow we enjoy meddling in the private sector.” (emphasis added)
Does anyone think Mr. Will came to this conclusion by running a statistical test of the President’s speeches, and doing a comparison to the median presidential speech use? I won’t accuse Mr. Will of lazily skimming a transcript of the President’s speech and passing off his thoughts as fact. But I sincerely hope he did, because any effort he put into this investigation was an utter waste of time.
Let’s assume that what he says is accurate. (1) President Obama does use the first person singular pronoun at a higher rate than, say, his predecessor. By itself, this is wholly uninteresting, and does not merit inclusion in the valuable space of the Post’s Op-Ed page. Surely, then, Mr. Will was assuming something further: (2) Use of the first person singular is positively correlated to the user’s feeling of self-importance. The unstated assumption (2), if true, could conceivably lead to the conclusion that Mr. Will is obviously trying to make. Of course, under actual scrutiny, (2) crumbles like a moldy wall.
It’s a common journalistic conceit to assume a feature of language use provides a clue to the speaker’s underlying psychological state. Language Log has an ongoing debunking of the argument involving: “Language X has no/few/many word(s) for concept Y.” Example: Eskimos have 25 words for snow. Language Log points out that the claim itself is usually false, and even if it were true, it would not support the intended conclusion. Language use is a complex phenomenon involving language acquisition, biological structures, syntax, regional variances, and speech pragmatics. It is not a simple reflection of a speaker’s ideology or psychology.
Undeterred, Mr. Will has adapted this conceit using his particular brand of non-argument. Actually asserting (2) would be subject to widespread mockery. So he instead mentions (1) in an off-hand manner and hopes his audience, who is already predisposed to thinking that the President has an inflated sense of self-worth, will use it to confirm what they already believe.
The beauty of this tactic is that the property in (2) can be anything: self-importance, willingness to use government intervention, elitism, cluelessness. Anything that appeals to the confirmation bias of the intended audience.
