It’s been a while between posts for me, so let me make up for it with one big one. Tucker Carlson (who Wikipedia tells me no longer wears a bowtie) got onto Sean Hannity’s show recently and declared that Michael Vick ought to have been executed for running a dogfighting ring.
(The backstory for the non-football-obsessed reader: Vick was a star quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons until the dogfighting ring came to light. He served 21 months in prison and filed bankruptcy as a result, and lost three years in the prime of his career. He’s since revived his career with the Philadelphia Eagles, and President Obama called the Eagles’ owner to commend him on giving Vick a chance to prove he was rehabilitated. It was this call that riled up Carlson.)
Eventually, word got back to Carlson that his position sounded a bit unwise, and he re-appeared on Hannity’s show to clarify that he does not actually believe what he had said. His clarification:
“This is what happens when you get too emotional. I’m a dog lover, I love them and — I know a lot about what Michael Vick did — I overspoke. I’m uncomfortable with the death penalty in any circumstance. Of course, I don’t think he should be executed, but I do think that what he did is truly appalling.”
Now, there’s a reasonable question to be asked here: should a man who claimed that Vick should never be forgiven, never even be given a chance to earn our forgiveness, be forgiven if he says that his hard-line stance was the result of saying something more than he mean to? Personally, I’m fine with forgiving Carlson, if for no other reason than that his Vick comments weren’t nearly the most offensively foolish things I’ve heard him say. (This willingness to forgive is part of why Carlson and I disagree politically.) I also have to give him credit for actually taking some blame; he didn’t claim he was taken out of context or that his opponents were trying to vilify him. He admitted that he said something that is not an accurate indication of his feelings. I have to offer my begrudging respect for that.
But not everyone is in a forgiving mood, and I’m sorry to say that they don’t all have a good argument for their intransigence. Specifically, Sherry Coven at Everything Language and Grammar has written a post complaining about Carlson’s use of overspoke, which she considers an incomprehensible coinage. She writes:
“Overspoke? I’m not sure what overspoke means.”
Really? Let’s pretend for a moment that we are back in third grade. If your education was anything like mine, the watchwords of reading class back then were context clues. When you encountered a word you didn’t know, you were supposed to look at the rest of the sentence, or the rest of the paragraph, and try to figure out what the word meant. So let’s try this with Carlson’s paragraph. First he says “I overspoke”, and then he says “Of course, I don’t think he should be executed, but I do think that what he did is truly appalling.” That suggests to me that I overspoke means “I said something that was much stronger than my true position.”
And, as it turns out, Coven guesses that this is the definition that Carlson intends, writing “The most logical assumption is that he meant that he’d said too much.” Good job! But then, like a child who you’ve assigned an undesired chore will impishly stare at the necessary tools in affected ignorance, as though they couldn’t possibly figure out how this rake could be used to move leaves into a pile, she too feigns ignorance. I can picture her exaggeratedly throwing up her hands, showing how impossible it is to understand this new word, as she writes, “But in that sense, what was too much? Did he think that he’d used too many words?”
C’mon, Coven, stop playing dumb. If you’re really having trouble with this one, you have absolutely no business writing about the English language, and especially not doing so on a blog called “Everything Language and Grammar”. But let’s say you’re really, honestly trying and just can’t crack the case. In that case, our third-grade reading classteacher could offer a second plan of attack: if context clues don’t help, look the word up in a dictionary. Alas, that didn’t help Coven:
“This is yet another example of the disconnect that can occur between speaker and listener when the speaker makes up a word instead of using perfectly good veteran words that are part of the English language. Even dictionary.com, which has never met a non-word it hasn’t liked, doesn’t embrace overspoke (yet).”
Yeah, I checked on dictionary.com. It’s true that searching for overspoke doesn’t return anything. Instead, it asks if maybe you meant to search for overspeak. And when I told it that I did in fact mean to search for that, here’s what it told me:
O`ver*speak”\, v. t. & i. [AS. ofersprecan.] To exceed in speaking; to speak too much; to use too many words.
Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.
If you’ll pardon another analogy, at this point I have to liken Coven to the fumblefingers in infomercials (pictured below).
Coven’s use of the dictionary seems akin to these fumblefingers’ use of eggs, ironing boards, and other everyday objects. She looks up an inflected form of a rare irregular verb — when any reasonable dictionary user looks up the infinitive form — and then gives up because she’d have to click on a link saying “Did you mean Overspeak?” in order to get to the definition.
But if she powered through these hurdles, she’d have seen that the word isn’t new; the copyright information dates it back to at least 1998. And a little bit more research (this time on Google Books) shows that it goes back much further. Here it is in a story from 1957. Here it is in a racist joke from 1910-1911. Here it is in a German-English dictionary from 1883.
And that still doesn’t bring us back to the inception of overspeak. The OED attests it back to the 17th century, with the definitions “to overstate or exaggerate, to make exaggerated claims for, to speak too strongly, to speak too much”. Hell, the OED even notes Carlson’s exact type of usage in a 2001 example:
“The three e-mails I received‥agreed that Falwell overspoke himself in the worst way.”
Coven closes with this thought:
“Carlson seemed to be making up a word in order to avoid taking responsibility for a radical opinion. Instead of saying I overspoke, he should have said what he meant—–whatever that was.”
The operative word here is seemed. It seemed to Coven that Carlson made up a word, even though a quick cursory search of Google Books or the Oxford English Dictionary (which, for crying out loud, is even having a free trial for the month) could have told her that Carlson was using a rare word in one of its standard meanings. But Coven’s too busy reprimanding Carlson to bother to see if he’s right. Mark Liberman, by comparison, initially guessed the same — that Carlson has invented a word in overspeak — but before writing a post about it, actually checked to see if his impression was correct. It wasn’t, and he ended up writing an informative post about the history of overspeak and its relationship to AAVE and Southern American English.
The lesson: never trust your instincts when you’re writing about someone’s speech. You’ll surely overspeak if you do.
Motivated Grammar 
15 comments
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January 18, 2011 at 10:55 am
mike
A characteristic of editors — and I should know, I am one — is to always assume the worst-case scenario for text. If a word is not standard, it’s “incomprehensible” or even “gibberish”; if a construction can in any possible way be interpreted ambiguously, assume that it will be; etc. (The latter is behind the editorial fear of dangling modifiers, even when the reader would have to work hard to arrive at an interpretation that would then be absurd anyway.)
The thing is, the impulse is genuine and even useful; that’s how editors root out text that genuinely does have problems. But it’s the immediate jumping to an extreme conclusion that’s sort of annoying. Yes, “overspoke” is a bit of an odd term, and it’s interesting to note its use by Carlson. But to pretend that it’s simply incomprehensible is dumb.
(I think people often severely underestimate how hard it is to speak off the cuff live on the air. You can get a clue if you can stand to listen to the filler that the on-air hosts provide during pledge drives on PBS or NPR; the extemporaneous exhortations to pledge by the normally well-spoken hosts are often the source of amusing (or painful, I suppose) language fails. I would invite Coven to spend, say, a year yacking on live TV and never make one false linguistic move.)
January 18, 2011 at 11:04 am
Jan Freeman
How interesting: I went to the “Everything Language” site, and it seems that two days ago the bloggers closed all comments (and hid existing ones), because they think of their site as a “source of information” (ha) rather than a discussion forum. Did you perhaps comment there on “overspoke”?
January 18, 2011 at 1:13 pm
Emily Michelle
Well, of course you can’t thoroughly search for evidence that disproves your point; what if you actually find some? What will you rant about then?
January 18, 2011 at 1:21 pm
goofy
I have a feeling that I’ve left comments on “Everything Language and Grammar” and the comments have subsequently been deleted or hid.
January 18, 2011 at 2:33 pm
mike
>”What will you rant about then?”
Well, if you’re persistent, you can rant about how the evidence is either wrong or irrelevant. :-) Or as goofy suggests, delete it. Haha.
January 18, 2011 at 3:28 pm
Ray Girvan
I rather go with the “playing dumb” interpretation. It’s a bit of a passive-aggressive game with some prescriptivists to claim they literally can’t understand constructs they feel to be non-standard – like the people who claim they really perceive “double negatives” to mean the opposite of what the speaker intends:
A: “I can’t get no satisfaction.”
B: “So, you *can* get satisfaction, then?”
January 18, 2011 at 10:07 pm
Ke$haFan4Ever
omg, there is something about the passion in your argument that i find incredibly sexy. more posts like this one please.
January 19, 2011 at 6:11 am
Padraig
I feel, but without any scientific evidence / formal research to back it up, that there has been an increasing move in recent times to create words to obscure the picture or evade responsibilty for inappropriate public statements and /or action.
Rather than simply admit the error, the “perpetrator” resorts to spin and / or the use of either obscure or invented words.
There was the use of “misspoke”, now we have “overspeak”. Before, we had “wardrobe malfunction” used to say, “I forgot to zip my fly” or “My dress zipper wasn’t done up properly”.
It’s one thing to research and find use and reference going back multiple decades, even hundreds of years ((as with the OED) – even back to Shakespeare. However, we all know that most of those users probably never sourced the OED and other texts before “creating” their new word. How many people use those texts, other than professionals and pedants?
It’s reasonable to propose that people who have found themselves in an awkward situation and determined to evade responsibility, find themselves inventing what might appear to be a bona fide word or expression. Why not use a word or expression with which everyone is familiar – you could say something like , “I must correct my misuse of (“a certain word”) or incorrect details recently. I really meant to say (“….”). I apologise for any misunderstanding, inconvenience or embarrassment caused”
The fact that certain words might have been used in the dim, distant past by a very people is not relevant to recent use by people who would never have read such sources in the first place, and effectively “made them up” on the spot.
January 19, 2011 at 6:16 am
goofy
Padraig, “overspeak” isn’t from the “dim, distant past”. Gabe gives an example from 2001. I’m not sure how you can be sure that Carlson never encountered the word before.
January 19, 2011 at 3:41 pm
The Ridger
Overspoke is absolutely unremarkable to me. I’ve heard it all my life. Plus, it clearly just means “said too much”, right? That’s a standard use of over- (cf overreached and overstepped)
January 20, 2011 at 11:29 am
Gabe
mike: You raise a point that I wish I had thought of. A good editor will, if you’ll pardon the bluntness, act dumb on occasion in order to suss out any rare or confusing usages, to fool-proof a text. But just as speakers will switch their tone from formal to informal in different situations, so too will a good editor (like you) switch from dunce-y while editing the text to intelligent while reading independently. It’s a poor editor who can’t compartmentalize the two. And, as you point out, it’s important to keep in mind what you’re editing: impromptu speech and edited writing are quite different. I can barely engage in serious conversations for fear of saying things I don’t mean.
Jan/goofy: How I wish I could take the credit, but their comments have been down awhile. Judging from their RSS feed ( http://languageandgrammar.com/comments/feed/ ), the last comment was received in November. The comments are still there, they’re just hidden. I am partially to blame for their initial shutdown of comments because I participated in a discussion informing the person who assuredly declared that too many people use “hopefully” as a verb that in fact no one uses “hopefully” as a verb.
Padraig/goofy: It may well be that Carlson dreamed up “overspeak” without having ever encountered it himself. (Mark Liberman’s discussion of the word on Language Log, though, leads me to believe that Carlson is from the right sociolinguistic background to have encountered the word before.) But the historical usage is still enlightening even if he’s unaware of it; if we see people repeatedly and independently invent the same word, it tells us that the word is especially reasonable and understandable for a neologism. Coven’s inability to understand it is especially galling in light of its multiple inventions.
Padraig: There’s a point that both you and Coven have made that I simply don’t understand. You both claim that in order to avoid admitting an error, Carlson is using an obscure/invented word. But he’s using a pretty transparent word to me, and more importantly, he defines exactly what he means by the word two sentences later. In fact, he almost exactly follows the apology outline you’d like. You wanted (and I’m adding sentence numbers to make the parallels explicit):
” [1] I must correct my misuse of (“a certain word”) or incorrect details recently. [2] I really meant to say (“….”). [3] I apologise for any misunderstanding, inconvenience or embarrassment caused”
And he gave you:
” [1] I overspoke. [1/2] I’m uncomfortable with the death penalty in any circumstance. [2] Of course, I don’t think he should be executed, but I do think that what he did is truly appalling.”
Sure, he doesn’t directly apologize or ask our forgiveness (sentence 3), but otherwise he’s doing just what you want. He takes responsibility and corrects what he said. He doesn’t explicitly state the punishment he really wanted, but he admits to being overemotional and clarifies his thoughts.
The Ridger: I wish I’d had your linguistic upbringing, because I didn’t know how much I needed the word “overspoke” until I found out about it.
January 20, 2011 at 6:43 pm
CaitieCat
It immediately brought to mind “overstated”, which has such a similar meaning as to (to my mind) make it patently obvious; one could assert that they function as a transitive/intransitive pair.
January 22, 2011 at 3:47 am
Padraig
To Gabe, goofy and The Ridger.
My overriding point related to my perception that in recent times many public figures, especially politicians, in countries around the world, have been resorting to a strategem to avoid embarrassment and personal responsibility. I hadn’t read the whole Coven post before Gabe’s article, but I see some similarity with my own thinking.
There have been many examples of politicians almost tying themselves in knots to avoid the S-word (sorry). This has been noticeable in the UK and Australia, particularly, but there are US examples. They’ll say it is “regretable”, “unhelpful”, “unfortunate”, someone “misspoke” (even “it was taken out of context”, when it’s clear it wasn’t), when the situation was one of saying somethng which is simply damaging to themselves, they realised that soon after, and now they are endeavouring to extract themselves from the mire caused by their own outspokenness.
It’s debatable, to be sure, but my interpretation in specific instances is that the word “misspoke” is misused in order to mislead the viewers / listerners / readers. My own evaluation of “misspoke” is along the lines of speaking or pronouncing incorrectly. In their cases, it was the content and the meaning of what they said which led to adverse reactions and
embarrassment.
I think it’s important to mention that it would be unusual / uncommon for “misspoke” to be used in British English. It would be regarded as slang or uneducated use – similarly, with overspeak/overspoke.
With the latter, an educated person, especially a public figure, could surely say “Ï said too much” or “Ï was too forthright” if he’d said/revealed too much, couldn’t he?
As for the OED reference, I’d suggest that a very small percentage indeed of people would refer to that (excellent) source – even with its online access. Would someone (Carlson, for example) subscribe and look up a words like “misspeak” and “overspeak”, or just scroll around looking for obscure/obsolete words? Anything’s possible, of course, but is it probable?
Further, in the 17th century there were no dictionaries to refer to and even when Dr Johnson published his (in 1755), virtually no one as a percentage would have had a copy or could read it anyway. The language was evolving, words were being invented all the time, then so many became obsolete. The fact that a particular word existed in those days is not an entirely convincing argument that a modern day person would have ever seen it before. I’m talking likelihood and probability.
As for some people thinking it clearly meant “said too much”, as it sounds it might, that’s not quite what Carlson did, IMO. It wasn’t just that he put too much information about, but he revealed a personality too easily inflamed and prone to extreme language – a different meaning, I think, though consistent with meanings in some önline dictionaries with which I don’t have too much confidence. The fact that some words (and their spellings) may be used/heard frequently doesn’t mean they should be
regarded as valid/standard – uneducated people can spell words any way they choose, of course, but do those spellings (and every (“variation”) need to be set out as if they do or might be acceptable?
January 22, 2011 at 7:54 am
mike
@Padraig:
>”to my perception that in recent times”
One of the points of both Gabe’s posts and of many of the posts on the Language Log is that assertions about language use should be based on evidence, not on things like personal perceptions. Here’s Geoff Pullum:
“[P]eople simply do not understand that their intuitively-based reports concerning what they see and hear and read in their country are often drastically mistaken. It is possible today to check these things empirically with some expectation of reasonable success. But people (and this includes linguists!) still tend to think that they have veridical intuitions concerning what occurs and what does not in their linguistic milieu.”
Here’s Arnold Zwicky:
“In the absence of counter-evidence, we take ourselves as the measure of all things; we treat our own experiences as fair samples of the phenomena in question. Even when other possibilities are available, we tend to generalize from our own perceptions, reasoning by anecdote; ordinary people don’t reason like scientists and in fact will often resist expert opinion in favor of their own. Of course, most of the time, there’s no alternative; hardly anyone is in a position to sample the phenomena scientifically, almost all of us are in a state of ignorance, so our perceptions, memories, beliefs, and opinions are all we have to go on. We’re set up to be illuded.”
And here’s Gabe:
“[E]ach of us is fluent not in English, but in an idiolect of English. When you encounter someone who deviates from the form of English you use, don’t be too quick to assume that it’s them, and not you, who deviate from Standard English. And never start complaining about it until you’ve checked the facts.”
You can make an assertion like “my perception in recent times is…”, but this isn’t particularly compelling; what you’d want to show is that politicians in non-recent times (whatever that might actually mean) apologized or otherwise “clarified” their statements in a different way that stands in contrast to Carlson. You’d want specific examples, and since you’re claiming a trend, numbers, including percentages.
Show us the usage numbers for “overspoke” that prove your point that Carslon was using it as a weasel word, and gather up a representative sampling of politicians’ apologies over time (it would be helpful to indicate the time range as well) that illustrate your thesis that apologies have changed in tenor. (I’d be especially interested in examples of the forthright apologies of politicians from non-“recent times”, and particularly so as evidence that this was the norm.)
January 27, 2011 at 10:08 pm
edits
It’s interesting how those who love language usually start out marvelling at how fluid and quick to evolve it is, but as they continue to study it they begin to covet one strict vernacular and relish in the opportunity to condem those who stray from it. They end up trying to keep language from evolving, which is a natural aspect of language–and the one thing that attracted them so much to it in the beginning.