Gender-neutral “he” and Wendy Davis’s filibuster

If you haven’t already heard, Texas’s state senate was engaged in a political thriller last night. I was able to catch the last 40 or so minutes of its livestream, riding that delightful roller-coaster of modern politics that trundles from dim optimism that something good will happen to the crushing realization that the deck has been stacked against it so thoroughly that you can only hope to minimize your losses.

Well, thankfully, there was a substantial group of state senators who managed to lack such pessimism and who stood up to do right by their constituents. Literally, in the case of Sen. Wendy Davis, who began a filibuster of an anti-abortion bill 13 hours before the special session was set to end at midnight. By rule, she had to keep talking throughout, stopping only to take questions. She was not allowed to sit, lean against a desk, leave the floor, or eat. None of this “silent” filibuster garbage of the federal senate: no, this is “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, wreck-your-body-because-you-believe-in-what’s-right dedication.

Sen. Tommy Williams couldn’t have looked more like a political caricature while arguing for a second strike against Davis’s filibuster because another member helped her adjust her back brace. [Photo: Patrick Michels, Texas Observer]

Davis made it ten hours before getting three strikes on her filibuster. Other senators took over, stalling until 11:45, when the Republican majority managed to trigger a vote to trigger a vote on the contemptible SB 5. With this first vote passed and the bill’s passage imminent, Sen. Leticia Van de Putte challenged the first vote on the basis of her having an outstanding inquiry at the time of the vote, a challenge the Senate president overruled by noting that he had not recognized her inquiry.

With calm fury reminiscent of Joe Welch, she asked, “At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room?” The gallery erupted in cheers that continued for the last fifteen minutes of the day, a cacophony that prevented the final roll-call vote from happening until after the midnight deadline. It was powerful stuff, and my eyes welled more than once throughout it.

But this is a grammar blog, and I wouldn’t bring this up unless there was a grammatical discussion to be had. Let’s go back to the second of the three strikes against Davis’s filibuster, the objection I’ve included Patrick Michels’s excellent picture of above. Claire Cardona wrote at the Dallas Morning News’s filibuster liveblog:

“Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, raised a point of order on the filibuster because Davis had help from Sen. Ellis to readjust her back brace. […] but Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, brings up a part in the rules that would permit Davis to sit. […] Zaffirini notes that the rules said ‘may not lean on his desk, his chair, and that note doesnt apply to Sen. Davis.'”

The rule in question, which I think is Senate Rule 4.01 [PDF, p. 8-9], reads:

“When a member has been recognized and is speaking on a motion to re-refer a bill, he must stand upright at his desk and may not lean thereon (61 S.J. Reg. 1760, 1762 (1969)).
When a member has the floor and is speaking on a bill or resolution, he must stand upright at his desk and may not lean or sit on his desk or chair (61 S.J. Reg. 1059 (1969)).”

Of course, we all know what is meant there, that the intended interpretation is gender-neutral he. We see such usages regularly, probably think little of it, and move on. To claim that the use of he in this rule means it doesn’t apply to a woman is crazy, surely.

Or is it? During a filibuster, pedantry is everywhere. I learned but one thing from the time I volunteered at a Model Congress convention: intent and common usage mean little as the parliamentarian sifts through Robert’s Rules of Order to decide which of the fourteen simultaneous objections takes precedence over the rest. Grammatical pedantry, so often out of place, is only fair in this situation.

The Canadian “Persons Case”, in which women were suing to be granted the right to be appointed to the Senate, depended in part on whether he included women. The legal gender-neutrality of he had in fact been specified in 1889’s Interpretation Act.

I’m no legal expert, and I’m certainly not an expert at what terminological choices are taken as given in the Texas Senate rulebook, so take this discussion with a grain of salt. But Zaffirini’s argument isn’t without merit. I found no declaration at any point in the Senate Rules that he is to be assumed as gender-neutral. In fact, there are eight instances of “his or her” in the rules — one occurring in the first sentence of Rule 4.01, the very rule being debated. If he is understood to be gender-neutral in the third and fourth sentences of Rule 4.01, why is he insufficient in the first?*

I wrote last year about how such uncertainty of the interpretation of gender-neutrality on the male pronoun in governmental settings was not a new concern: even the first U.S. Congress, in 1790, used “he or she” in some of their bills. It’s all hair-splitting, of course, but it’s a hair that may need to be split. When the issue at hand is so entwined with gender, maybe it’s a good time to examine our assumptions, starting with a little pronoun.

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*: Possibly because the third and fourth sentences are based on 1969 formulations and the first sentence isn’t. But are Senate rules to be interpreted diachronically or synchronically?

Congress may be getting dumber, but grade levels don’t prove it

A news story’s making the rounds this week that the members of the U.S. Congress have stopped talking at an 11th-grade level and have started talking at a 10th-grade level. This fits very neatly into the overall feeling that America is becoming ever more anti-intellectual, that Congress has become a group of petty and immature cliques who exist primarily to prevent each other from accomplishing anything, which is why the story has picked up steam. And perhaps these feelings are accurate, but this story doesn’t provide any evidence of it.

In short, the Flesch-Kincaid readability test that’s used in this analysis is completely inappropriate for the task.

I discussed this during the Vice-Presidential debates back in 2008, and Chad Nilep at the Society for Linguistic Anthropology and Mark Liberman at Language Log each talked about it in light of this new story. Here’s an updated set of arguments why the whole thing is nonsense.

How do we deal with speech errors? Speech has something that writing doesn’t have: disfluencies. Whether it’s a filled pause (uh, um, you know), a correction (We have — I mean, don’t have), an aborted phrase (I am a man with– I have goals), there’re lots of words that come through in speech that wouldn’t be in edited writing. Here’s an example from the 2008 debate, where Gwen Ifill said:

“The House of Representatives this week passed a bill, a big bailout bill — or didn’t pass it, I should say.”

That’s a sentence supposedly at the eighth-grade level. If we remove the mistakes & repetitions, we get a sentence that has now dropped a grade level. That’s the same drop that Congress supposedly has undergone. Maybe they just started editing the Congressional Record more tightly?

Grade levels aren’t based on content or ideas. The Flesch-Kincaid grade level calculation uses two statistics: syllables per word and words per sentence. These are imprecise stand-ins for want we really want, which is presumably the difficulty of the individual words and the complexity of the sentence structure. Word difficulty is going to be tied to their predictability in context, their frequency in the language, their morphological complexity, and other factors, all of which are loosely correlated with the number of syllables. Longer words will in general be more difficult, but there is a lot of noise in the correlation. Because we’re only using an estimate of the difficulty, our estimate of the grade level is inherently imprecise.

There is no punctuation in speech. There are lots of different ways to punctuate a speech. Is a given pause supposed to indicate a comma, a semicolon, or a period? The difference between these can be substantial; Nilep’s post shows how punctuating the speech errors as sentences of their own drop a sentence from grade level 28(!) to 10.

The rhetorical style of a speaker also comes into play here. Suppose Senator X and Senator Y deliver the same speech. Senator X uses a staccato style, where each clause becomes its own sentence. Senator Y uses a more relaxed and naturalistic style, combining some clauses with semicolon-ish pauses. Because the reading level calculation is based largely on number of words per sentence, Senator Y is going to get a much higher grade level, even though the only difference is in the delivery, not any of the content.

What does the grade level measure? The idea of grade-level estimation for writing was to give a quick estimate of how difficult a passage is to understand. The main readability scores were calibrated by asking people with known reading proficiency (as determined by a comprehension test or the grade level they were in) to read passages of various difficulty and to answer comprehension questions. The goal of the calibration was to get it so that if a piece of writing had a grade level of X, then people who read at the X level would be able to get some given percent of the comprehension questions right. Crucially, the grade level does not measure the content of the text, or the intelligence of the ideas it contains. In fact, for readability — the purpose the tests were developed for — a lower score is always better, assuming the same information is conveyed.

As I mentioned above, there’s a world of difference between reading and writing, so this calibration is probably invalid for speech. But if was valid, then we’d probably want to see the level go down.

The designers knew grade levels were imprecise measures. In a 1963 paper, George Klare wrote:

“Formulas appear to give score accurate to, or even within, one grade-level. Yet actually they are seldom this accurate.”

In a 2000 paper, George Klare wrote:

“Typical readability formulas are statistical regression equations, not mathematical identities, and do not reach that level of precision.”

I mention the two quotes here because they span 40 years of readability research, and the point remains the same. Grade-level assessment is somewhat informative, but it’s not very precise. You can be reasonably certain that a child will understand a third-grade level story better than a twelfth-grade level one. It is not nearly so certain that a tenth-grade level and eleventh-grade level story will be distinguishable. In fact, the Kincaid et al paper from 1975 that debuted the Flesch-Kincaid reading level calculation acknowledges its imprecision:

“Actually, readability formulas are only accurate to within one grade level, so an error of .1 grade level is trivial.”

Conclusions. So what we have here is a difference of 1 grade level (which is the edge of meaningfulness in ideal circumstances) when the reading level calculation is applied to speech, on which it is uncalibrated and in which we don’t have clear plans in place to account for the vagaries of punctuation and the issue of speech errors. Also, we have no data on the cause of the grade level decrease, whether it’s due to dumbing down, a push for clarity, or just new punctuation guidelines at the Congressional Record.

Which is to say, we have no reason to believe in this effect, nor to draw conclusions about its source, other than the unfortunate fact that we have a belief crying out to be validated.

Your modifier’s misplaced, but mine’s fine

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a fan of David Foster Wallace, but truth be told, my antipathy for his work is less about his writing specifically and more about what I consider a fault of a genre, spanning other well-regarded authors such as Don DeLillo and Dave Eggers, who are very smart people obsessed with writing about mundanity in an self-important tone, all the while stressing that a self-important tone is hardly necessary because, really, what we’re talking about is just the mundanity of life; but then again, the mundanity of life is what it’s all about, right?, and there’s so much going on under the surface that we really ought to be paying attention to but no one ever does, and as a result we find it nearly impossible to understand each other because we fail to pick up on the cues we need — so what we ought to do is look at the events of our lives and analyze them and propose explanations for why others act the way they do, even as we know that all such analysis is doomed from the get-go by the fact that we are each of us impenetrable shells to everyone else, even as no one knows and no one can know what goes on inside the black-box of another’s head, and even as trying to understand others will only get us closer to the curse of the human condition, the knowledge that none of us will ever truly know another.*

I find this genre (which may be “hysterical realism“, but I’m not sure) to be infuriating. I usually say that it’s in part because its writing style is impenetrable, and in part because it’s ironic and sincere at the same time but wants its irony to be taken as sincerity. But I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s more that it’s close enough to my own writing style and philosophy for the writing to speak to me, and yet just different enough for me to feel like they’re doing it wrong.**

I’ve tried reading a few of the other authors’ stuff, but I’ve never read any of DFW’s — excepting the generally terrible essay “Tense Present” that pretty much every language blogger loves or loathes and one misguided grammar worksheet from his time as a professor. I wanted to give him a fair shake, since many people I whose opinions I respect find him worth a read. The chance to do so finally presented itself when, at the end of last quarter, I found a box of free books that the bookstore had apparently decided against buying back.

Nestled amongst sociology textbooks, I found McCain’s Promise, a nice short DFW book that arose from his Rolling Stone article on John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign. I quickly realized why this one wasn’t bought back, as it’s filled with pink highlighter and insightful margin notes like “Major fish bowl (sorority)”.***

All the same, it’s been a great read, and I have to apologize for having pre-judged DFW’s writing from his grammar discussions. Writing about a frantic campaign trail excursion fits his legato writing style well, and he’s capable of stating something that you sort of know you ought to care about in a way that makes you realize exactly why it matters and why you need to do something about it as soon as you can. His final section, talking about leadership, is stirring and may have slightly changed how I interact with people.

But, gosh, if the man just can’t go a hundred pages without saying something dumb about grammar. Worse, it’s in the midst of the second-best part of the book, a fascinating analysis of the turning point of McCain’s campaign. He’s talking about the day where Bush goaded McCain into going negative, turning the perception of McCain from the principled anti-candidate to just another mudslinging win-at-all-costs candidate. (Which became an even greater turning point due to the ripples from it we saw in McCain’s 2008 campaign.) I’m reading along, almost skimming at points because I’m so excited about what he’s going to say next, when I slam into this barrier of a sentence:

” […] and then on Wednesday AM on TV at the Embassy Suites in Charleston there’s now an even more aggressive ad that [senior strategist] Murphy’s gotten McCain to let him run, which new ad accuses Bush of unilaterally violating the handshake-agreement and going Negative and then shows a nighttime shot of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.’s famous facade with its palisade of blatantly ejaculatory fountains in the foreground and says ‘Can America afford another politician in the White House that we can’t trust?,’ about which nobody mentions the grammatical problems but Frank C. says that the shot of the White House is really going low with the knife, and that if McCain loses South Carolina it may very well be because of this ad […]” (boldface mine, italics his)

I can’t see a grammar problem in that italicized question at all, let alone the multiple problems that DFW implies.**** The only thing I’ve managed to come up with is that DFW’s claiming the modifier’s misplaced, and that the relative clause that we can’t trust seems not to modify the clearly intended antecedent politician but rather the absurd White House. And if that’s the case, he’s just being an idiot. Here’s the (simplified) tree-diagram for the end of the question:

Politician has two modifiers, each of which has to be trailing (in the White House politician is awful), so one of them is going to have to be separated from politician. But the beauty of human language syntax is that there are long-distance dependencies, connections that can span over intervening material. In the tree above, the relative clause attaches to a noun phrase headed by politician, successfully modifying politician as the ad’s writer intended. The same string of words could also have a different structure, where the RC attaches to the lower White House noun phrase, but pragmatics tell us pretty strongly that there is little chance of this being a correct parse.

For the sake of argument, we could swap the RC and PP, but we’re still going to have ambiguity; if it’s another politician that we can’t trust in the White House, there’s the unintended meaning that we specifically can’t trust the politician to be in the White House — as though Bush would be a trustworthy senator or governor but suddenly scheming as a president.

Actually, there were two untrustworthy periods for the White House: when it was burnt in 1814 by the invading British (pictured above), and in Truman's time, when it was almost completely rebuilt due to poor maintenance in previous years.

In fact, although the difference in these last two meanings is subtle, I’d say that’s the only possible ambiguity, not the one Wallace suggests. The ambiguity between an untrustworthy politician and an untrustworthy building is illusory; only a structural engineer is likely to meaningfully distrust a building. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible to have a politician who’s good at one position but not another; I often think of Taft here, who I was taught in school was a bad president but a great Supreme Court Justice.

But the key point here is that if even if this truly was a problem, it’s a problem that DFW himself commits a few pages later. Discussing the people at McCain’s town hall meetings, he refers to one group as:

“[…] ancient vets in Legion caps who call McCain ‘Lieutenant’ […]”

The relative clause is of course supposed to modify ancient vets, but due to the interceding prepositional phrase, it’s conceivable that it could modify Legion caps instead. Of course that’s absurd. Even in hysterical realism, caps don’t talk. But I don’t see any more absurdity in talking caps than in untrustworthy presidential mansions. It’s beyond me why one has grammatical problems and the other doesn’t.

Neither of these is ambiguous. Sure, the possibility exists that they could be ambiguous in the right context, and likewise the possibility exists that an inattentive reader might briefly be tripped up by these sentences. (In fact, I was briefly tripped up by the latter, but only because the former primed my brain to analyze later sentences.) But a child could read these sentences and tell you that it’s the politician who’s untrusted and the vets who’re calling McCain “Lieutenant”.

The problem is that these supposed ambiguities are often in the eye of the beholder; DFW presumably found nothing wrong with his sentence, because he knew what he intended, and that knowledge makes it difficult to see the structural ambiguity. But as merely a consumer of the McCain ad’s sentence, DFW has no foreknowledge of its meaning, and thus the structural ambiguity becomes detectable.

In the end, calling attention to a syntactic ambiguity that is rendered unambiguous by semantics just feels petty and snotty, the educational equivalent of name dropping, an “oh of course I know this thing that a professional writer doesn’t”. But it’s a weird thing for DFW to make a point of in this essay, as he spends much of the rest of it slagging the veteran reporters (“The Twelve Monkeys”) for being a bunch of pompous and insular snobs slavishly concerned with appearances and looking down their noses at everyone else. DFW sets himself up as the people’s champion, gushing over the minor insights of the audio-video crew in a show of underclass solidarity, only to go out of his way to remind the reader that he is only a tourist in Bluecollarburg, that he belongs with The Twelve Monkeys, if only they’d have a thirteenth.

Summary: Sometimes a noun phrase has two modifiers following it. If one ordering is less ambiguous than the other, you should probably use the less ambiguous one, assuming both orderings sound okay. But you only have to worry about real ambiguities, not ones that require mental gymnastics to misinterpret.

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*: I’m following Wallace’s style here, and will be profusely footnoting as a minor homage.

**: Having gone to a Dr. Seuss exhibition at a La Jolla gallery the other night, I can’t help but draw parallels to the situation of his “The Butter Battle Book“. Likewise, sports and college rivalries.

***: I’m not being entirely sarcastic, as the notes were insightful into the mind of the modern American undergraduate. I’m skewing the sample by choosing that note as my example; many of the notes were clear attempts to map what DFW was talking about into the reader’s own life in a way that I expect brought her a deeper appreciation of the text. If I were doing the same, a subsequent reader would probably find “like converting a 4th & long” and “cf. obscure song from the 90s” and no doubt make snarky remarks about my intellectual depth as well.

****: I asked you on Twitter about this, and all the responses seemed to agree that the problem, such as it is, has to rest on an attachment ambiguity or that/who(m) choice. I’m going to focus on attachment ambiguity here because the “people need who(m)” claim is obviously untrue, and it’s something that many others have already discussed. Thanks to everyone for your help!

Jumping to conclusions on “overspeak”

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.