Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at Sunlight and a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, calculated the Flesch-Kinkaid Readability score for the Congressional Record from 1996-2012. According to his calculation, text in the Congressional Record from 2005 scored 11.5, while text from 2011 scored 10.6.

According to NPR’s Tamara Keith, “In other words, Congress dropped from talking like juniors to talking like sophomores.”

Nonsense. The Flesch-Kinkaid Readability Test purports to be a test of readability, not speech style. Furthermore, although the grade-level score is intended to map reading-ease scores to US grade levels, both scores need to be taken with a proverbial grain of salt.

As Gabe Doyle at Motivated Grammar argued in 2008, Flesch-Kinkaid scores do not correlate significantly with listening comprehension, even for edited prose. Transcription of extemporaneous speech is likely even less well correlated, since things like corrections, false starts, and fillers do not appear in most written texts, and there is often no obvious and uncontroversial way to segment a spoken utterance into sentences. (Flesch-Kinkaid essentially measures the number of words per sentence, and the number of syllables per word. See below for an example of how arbitrary such measurements can be.)

Of course, what lies behind Drutman’s analysis and NPR and Keith’s reporting of it is the impression that recent political movements, especially the Tea Party, have dumbed down the level of political discourse in the United States. New York Times columnist David Brooks has written of the Tea Party, “The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities.” Conservative Republicans, Tea Party members, even presidential candidate Mitt Romney are accused of either being or acting dumb.

It is against this background that Drutman notes, “[The] complexity of speech in the Congressional Record has declined steadily since 2005, with the drop among Republicans slightly outpacing that for Democrats,” and NPR finds it newsworthy.

I leave it to more competent statisticians to decide whether the variation in grade level scores Drutman found is statistically significant. Given the vagaries involved in deciding how to represent speech in written form, and the irrelevance of reading ease to listening comprehension, though, I suggest that the findings are linguistically insignificant.

Just for fun — punctuation and F-K scores

Tamara Keith cites the following as an example of a sentence from the law maker with the highest grade rating, Republican California Representative Dan Lungren:

This Justice Department, in my judgment, based on the experience I’ve had here in this Congress, 18 years, my years as the chief legal officer of the state of California and 35 or 40 years as a practicing attorney tells me that this administration has fundamentally failed in its obligation to attempt to faithfully carry out the laws of the United States.

By my calculation, that sentence has a Flesh-Kinkaid Grade Level score of 27.63. (According to Drutman, Lungren has a “Career grade level” of 16.01.)

But the phrase “This justice department” does not appear to have a clear grammatical role in any of the clauses that follow it. “This justice department” looks like a topic initiation, and it is co-referential with “this administration”, the subject of an embedded clause. But it is not an argument in the clauses “my years… tells me” [sic] or “this administration has fundamentally failed”, nor in the non-finite clause “obligation to attempt to faithfully carry out the laws”, and it’s certainly not an argument of “I’ve had here”.

Likewise, the phrases “the experience”, “18 years”, and “my years” all appear to refer to the same thing. Lungren thus re-starts the utterance several times. Such restarts are not uncommon in extemporaneous speech.

What if we change the punctuation to make the abandoned and re-started topics in Lungren’s utterance free-standing sentence fragments?

This Justice Department. In my judgment, based on the experience I’ve had here in this Congress. 18 years. My years as the chief legal officer of the state of California and 35 or 40 years as a practicing attorney tells me that this administration has fundamentally failed in its obligation to attempt to faithfully carry out the laws of the United States.

Suddenly grade level drops to 9.68. Is this a more sensible way of calculating grade level? Probably not. Both transcriptions make somewhat arbitrary choices to force the extemporaneous speech into something resembling written prose. Neither tells us anything particularly interesting about Representative Lungren or his speech style. Any analysis of either should probably remain where Drutman says the idea came from: “We just kind of did it for fun.”

Afterword

I anticipate that some commenter may refer to Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker’s position on public education, or erstwhile presidential candidates Rick Perry, who promised to eliminate the US Department of Education, or Rick Santorum, who seemed to suggest that college attendance is snobbery, as evidence of an anti-intellectual bent among Republicans. I’ll stake no strong position on such an argument at this time, but will assert that simple-minded word counting is a poor gauge of trends in political ideology under the best of circumstances.

I also recommend Mark Liberman’s 2010 critique on Language Log of a conversely simple-minded conclusion, a suggestion that a speech by President Obama was “too professorial”. Amusingly, in 2010 Obama’s ninth-grade reading level speech was called too complex, while Congress’s average tenth-grade reading level speeches are now called unsophisticated.

The 2013 LSA Linguistic Institute will be held in Ann Arbor, MI from June 24-July 19, 2013. The list of courses currently planned can be found here. (We are working on tagging them to make more dynamically searchable–that should be live in a week or so).

We are also currently soliciting proposals for workshops and conferences to be held in connection with the Institute. The call for proposals for these are now available on our website (http://lsa2013.lsa.umich.edu/call-for-workshop-proposals.html). If you’ve been thinking about a workshop you’d like to create, this would be a great opportunity.

If you have any questions about the Institute generally or the workshops specifically, please contact Robin Queen (rqueenumich.edu).

[The preceding is a guest post from Robin Queen.]

Society for Linguistic Anthropology Annual Undergraduate Student Essay Competition

The Society for Linguistic Anthropology holds an annual student essay competition at both undergraduate and graduate levels. THIS IS THE UNDERGRADUATE SECTION OF THE CONTEST. In order to be eligible for this award, the entrant must have been an undergraduate student in a degree-granting program when the paper was written; must be the sole author of the paper; and must submit the paper no more than two years after it was written.

The paper must be an original work based on original research conducted by the author.  It will be evaluated on the basis of its clarity, significance to the field, engagement with relevant literatures, and if it makes an original contribution to linguistic anthropological knowledge. At the time of submission for this competition, the paper must not have been published or submitted for publication.

Submissions will be evaluated by a panel of judges.  A prize will be awarded in this category only if a submission of sufficiently high quality is received.  The winner or winners will be announced at the SLA business meeting, which is held during the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

Entries must be submitted electronically in either .pdf or .doc format.  They should be sent to Jillian Cavanaugh (SLA Executive Committee Member at Large and organizer of this year’s competition) at  jcavanaugh@brooklyn.cuny.edu by the deadline of June 30.  The cover sheet should include: the title of the paper; the author’s name; the author’s email address; the author’s college or university affiliation; the prize category (undergraduate or graduate) for which the paper is being submitted; and the name of the faculty member who served as the student’s advisor with respect to the writing of the paper.

One passage in particular so drew my attention that I wanted to subject it to a bit more analysis. Abe interviews the manager of a lesbian bar, who she calls A. She notes that the word futsuu (ordinary) is used in complex ways, to describe both heterosexual identities and the ordinary lives of the manager and patrons of her bar.

Minna hontoo ni futsuu no renai o shite iru n desu yo ne. Naimenteki na bubun ga chigau tte yuu ka. Futokutei tasuu no hitobito ni yotte tsukuridasareta imeeji to yuu mono ga, henken o umidashita tte yuu no wa aru to omou. Shinjitsu o wakatte nai to yuu ka. Futsuu no onna no ko demo, rezu baa tte donna tokoro na no ka na, mitai na kanji de kuru shi, kite mireba, a, nan da futsuu no mono nan da mitai na. Onna no ko hitori de mo anshin shite nomi ni kite kuremasu yo. Futsuu no onna no ko mo ippai kimasu. Shufu no hito mo iru shi, kareshi ga iru kedo kuru ko mo imasu shi ne.

‘Lesbians have ordinary love relationships, you know. Internally, we are different. Some people created the image of lesbians as different, which created prejudice, I think. They don’t know the real truth. Ordinary women come here because they’re curious. Once they come, they realize how ordinary we are. Girls can feel comfortable coming here on their own to drink. Lots of ordinary women come here, including housewives and women who have boyfriends.
[Abe 2004, 210-211]

Earlier in her fieldwork Abe was surprised to hear another woman, who she calls C, use the word futsuu to mean heterosexual, “because I thought that the speaker meant that she considered herself and other lesbians not ordinary” (p. 210). In the data quoted above, though, “the speaker characterizes lesbians’ love relationships as futsuu because she wants heterosexuals to be inclusive of her by thinking of her as ordinary” (p. 211). In addition to Abe’s observation about two uses of the word by two different speakers, the shifting meaning of futsuu in A’s speech seem to bear additional analysis.

In her description of bar patrons A uses the word futsuu four times. Twice she uses the phrase futsuu no onna no ko (普通の女の子 “ordinary girls”). This category includes shufu no hito (主婦の人 “housewives”) and kareshi ga iru ko (彼氏がいる子 “kids who have boyfriends”). Thus, like other women Abe interviewed, A uses futsuu no onna no ko to refer to heterosexual women.

Another occurrence of futsuu comes in indirect quoted speech. According to A, when they come to the bar and see what goes on women think, ‘a, nan da futsuu no mono nan da‘ (あっ、なんだ普通のものなんだ。 “Oh, how ordinary it is”).* In this example A says that newcomers to the bar—and in context this seems to include, if not refer exclusively to, heterosexual women—regard the staff and regular customers as futsuu.

The other occurrence of futsuu is translated into English as “Lesbians have ordinary love relationships”. This is a decent translation, as A appears to be talking about the patrons of her bar as well as other people who would identify as part of the same group. The Japanese sentence, “Minna hontoo ni futsuu no renai o shite iru n desu yo ne,” does not explicitly label that group as “lesbian”, however. The sentence could equally be translated as “Everybody really has ordinary romantic relationships, you know.” The key point is that minna (皆 “everyone”) can be understood as having multiple referents. While the most likely immediate reference is everyone in the bar, at the same time the word can mean lesbians generally, women generally, or all people, among other possibilities.

Abe is quite right that A’s use of futsuu functions to include heterosexuals and homosexuals, bar patrons and non-patrons within a broad identity position. The multiple occurrences of the word with slightly shifting reference contribute to the effect.

* The word mono most usually refers to non-human objects or to abstract concepts. Sometimes, though, it is used for human beings. Thus the phrase could also be translated as “Oh, how ordinary they are.”

Abe, Hideko. 2004. Lesbian bar talk in Shinjuku, Tokyo. In S. Okamoto and J. Shibamoto Smith (eds.), Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology: Cultural Models and Real People. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 205-221.

Members of AAA and SLA can vote by logging in at www.aaanet.org with your online username and password and clicking “Vote Now” from the information page.

The ballot includes information about the candidates for each position. Click “Details” below each candidate’s name.

If you have any technical problems or difficulties, please email elections@aaanet.org for assistance.

Related announcement: AAA and SLA Election Candidates

Association-wide candidates are also listed at the AAA blog, along with links to descriptions of positions and committees.

In case you missed it, here are the candidates for AAA and SLA positions, as listed in Anthropology News. For other sections, please refer to AN directly, or follow the link above to the PDF pages.

Fact rings false

Wilson describes reactions to a scene in the television drama “Mad Men” that draws from a 1966 New York Times article. In the TV series, set at an advertising agency in 1966, civil rights protesters have water dropped on them from the offices of the Young and Rubicam advertising agency, high above the sidewalk where they are picketing. When the protesters go up to the office to demand an apology, one comments, “And they call us savages.”

Television critics have apparently panned the scene, and particularly the “savages” line. But according to Wilson, “Mad Men” producer Matthew Weiner and his fellow writers based the scene closely on an article in the 28 May 1966 edition of the Times. The story describes protesters at the Office of Economic Opportunity being heckled by Young &  Rubicam executives, having water dropped on them, and demanding an apology in the Y&R office. Times reporter John Kifner happened to be on the scene, and his story quotes Vivian Harris as saying, “And they call us savages.”

Despite the 2012 television script’s adherence to the 1966 newspaper article, television critic Mike Hale insists, “It [the 'savages' line] just rings so false.” Another critic, Matt Zoller Seitz, similarly tells Wilson, “It’s good to know that all that actually happened, but it’s still a terrible line in context of the scene.”

I found the interplay of historical fact and artistic verisimilitude interesting. Critic Hale suggests that the Mad Men line is “false” even though it uses the same location, the same advertising agency, and even the same words reported in the 1966 New York Times article. There is no suggestion that the Times article was false or inaccurate, but what was presumably ‘true’ for newspaper readers is nonetheless ‘false’ for television viewers.

Ethics of attention

Zuckerman’s piece synthesizes a larger debate about fact and ‘truth’ in media. He starts with Mike Daisey, a story teller and monologist whose “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” and more specifically the version of the story excerpted on the radio program “This American Life” has garnered a great deal of attention among journalists, the blogosphere, and social media. Daisey’s monologue tells of a trip he took to Shenzen, China, to find where the Apple computer products he loves are made, and describes brutal working conditions at the factory. It has since come out that the monologue mixes Daisey’s actual experiences in Shenzen with second-hand stories from other parts of China and with fictional elements. This American Life has published a “Retraction”, an episode  in which reporter Rob Schmidtz analyzes the factual and the fictional elements of Daisey’s story and program host Ira Glass confronts the story teller about presenting fictional elements as though they were reportage.

Ethan Zuckerman connects Daisey’s story with the “Gay Girl in Damascus” blog and the “Kony 2012″ video, among other recent events. “A Gay Girl in Damascus” purported to be the daily weblog of woman activist in Syria who suddenly went missing in June 2011. It was later learned that the blogger was actually Tom McMaster, an American man who created an alter-ego to draw attention to the crisis in Syria (though some argue he did it more to draw attention to himself).

“Kony 2012″ is a video posted to YouTube by a group called Invisible Children on 5 March 2012 and viewed by more than 100 million people. It describes Joseph Kony, leader of the Lords Resistance Army in northern Uganda from the 1980s until 2006 and currently a fugitive wanted in connection with war crimes. Unlike Daisey or McMaster, Invisible Children is  not accused of fabricating the details of its video. However, they have been criticized for oversimplifying their story in a way that may provide false impressions. For example, it is not clear from the video that Kony fled Uganda in 2006. The video is also criticized for placing Americans at its center and not presenting the voices of Ugandans.

Zuckerman brings together these incidents to encourage discussion and thought about the ethics of attracting attention.

We’ve seen a rise in the ability to create media and advocate for your cause and your viewpoint over the past decade. And there’s been a massive rise in content available to all of us – and an accompanying rise in ability to choose what we pay attention to – over the past two decades. The result is an increasingly fierce battle for attention.
…
With stories like Daisey’s and Kony 2012, the conversation switches from the practical question of seizing attention to the ethical questions of attention.

Zuckerman encourages readers to think about what is fair and unfair in drawing attention to a story, including how much simplification or alteration of facts is acceptable.

Truth, falsity, and genre

All of this has me reflecting on the relationship between narrative and ‘truth’ – a word that I think warrants scare quotes. Moreover, I find myself thinking about the nature of ‘truth’ in different domains.

The oft-expressed observation that fiction can be a means of addressing ‘deeper truth’ shows that there may be multiple ways of thinking about truth even within a relatively orthodox worldview. The cases summarized above, I think, reveal tensions between competing standards.

For critic Mike Hale a fictional story needs to feel believable, a feeling that does not depend on adherence to recorded events. Journalists, on the other hand, are expected to report events accurately, with the framing of events and ideas sometimes addressed as an ethical question.

For storyteller Mike Daisey, combining factual and fictitious elements is an appropriate use of “the tools of theater and memoir” to make people care about real events. Daisey says, “I don’t know that I would say in a theatrical context that it isn’t true.” Producer Ira Glass, in contrast, asks Daisey whether his theatrical performance shouldn’t carry a warning label “so that the audience in the theater knows that this isn’t strictly speaking a work of truth.”

For the producers of Kony 2012, the film is a useful entrance to the ‘ladder of engagement’, a series of steps by which an individual becomes aware of, then informed about, and finally active around a political or social cause. For many of the video’s critics, though, its over-simplification of events in the creation of an engaging narrative is a form of untruth.

[Hat tip to Alex Enkerli, who brought Ethan Zuckerman's essay to my attention, and to John McIntyre, who pointed me to Michael Wilson's article.]

Recent calls include:

• AAA 2012 CFP: Languages of Democracy: Voice, Register and the Vernacularization of Democratic Discourse, Elina Hartikainen
• CFP (AAA 2012) Voices in movement: Phonetic border crossings , Lal Zimman
• CFP – 2012 AAA Meetings – Healing Speech in the Cultural Borderlands of Illness , Jennifer Guzman
• AAA Panel on Mediated Boundaries: Language and Ethnography in the Internet Age, Faudree, Paja
• CFP AAA 2012: Ethnography at the Borders of the Intimate, Anna Jaysane-Darr
• CFP: AAA panel “Polyphony in Politics”, Elise Kramer
• CFP “Speaking Across Borders: Language, Mobility and Community” AAA Annual Meetings in SF 2012, Elizabeth Anne Falconi
• AAA 2012 Panel CFA: Language and Indigenous Diaspora(s), Jenny L Davis
• 2012 AAA Meeting CFP: “Making Space for Spirits”, Jesse Ellen Davie-Kessler

[UPDATE 21 March, two more calls]

• CFP for AAA 2012 “The Limits of Language”, Mara Green
• CFP: Acts of Reception, Katherine Martineau and Christina P. Davis

[UPDATE 24 March]

• AAA 2012 CFP: Mediating boundaries, mediating possibilities: language and technologies in the construction of identity, Rachel Flamenbaum et alia

[UPDATE 27 March]

• CFP – Semiotic Hitchhikers panel AAA 2012, Judy Pine
• AAA 2012 CFP: “What’s your point?” The political-economy of discourse topic, Matthew Wolfgram

[UPDATE 3 April]

• AAA Panel – Transgressive Media: Crossing disciplinary and mediated borders , Karl Swinehart
• AAA 2012 CFP: Women on Frontiers , Leila Monaghan

Also remember the main SLA call for submissions, AAA 2012 and the SLA call for application/registration waivers recently announced here.

And for CFP lagniappe:

• CFP: AHA New Orleans Jan 3-6 2013, Native Women at the Frontiers, Leila Monaghan

Other calls for papers? You can send them to LINGANTH, and let us know by mail or through the comments below if you’d like them listed here.

*Speaking of LINGUIST List, I would be remiss if I did not mention that the annual quest for donations to support this free service, this year labeled “LingQuest”, is going on now.

Johnstone’s article describes the treatment of “Pittsburghese” – a linguistic variety that local people associate with Pittsburgh – in local newspapers, an online forum, a website called “Pittsburghese.com” and the Wikipedia page Pittsburgh English. As Johnstone describes it, newspaper articles about local ways of talking have tended to favor ‘man on the street’ type reporting, with local residents as a primary source of knowledge. One academic, University of Pittsburgh instructor Robert Parslow, was quoted in several articles from the 1960s and 70s, and academics have been quoted since then, though their claims to knowledge are usually not privileged as authoritative but treated as equivalent to the knowledge of other local people.

When Johnstone and Dan Baumgardt significantly re-wrote the Wikipedia entry for Pittsburgh English in 2006, they expected to face resistance from other contributors to the site. What they found, however, was that their new version, citing a wealth of sociolinguistic studies, was easily accepted. “That article has since been edited,” Johnstone says, “but the editing has only made it more technical and limited participation rights in the editing process to people familiar with the relevant scholarly literature.” In contrast to newspapers, which seem to put a premium on personal experience and ‘authenticity’, it is Wikipedia that appears to value technical expertise and the published record. Johnstone notes, “Ironically, the voice of ordinary Pittsburghers – unless they are linguists or can cite the literature of sociolinguistics and dialectology – is even less present [on Wikipedia] than it was in the least interactive of media, the pre-internet print newspaper report” (2011: 12).

Timothy Messer-Kruse’s experience with Wikipedia has received a relatively wide airing. In addition to his piece in The Chronicle, he has discussed his experiences on the Talk of the Nation and On the Media radio programs, and associate editor Rebecca Rosen has written about it at The Atlantic.

Messer-Kruse, an historian and an expert on the 1886 Haymarket Riots, “decided to experiment with editing one particularly misleading assertion chiseled into the Wikipedia article” Haymarket affair, according to his Chronicle piece. As of January 2009* the Wikipedia article said, “The prosecution, led by Julius Grinnell, did not offer evidence connecting any of the defendants with the bombing” that led to the death of eight police officers and numerous civilians. Yet the trial lasted six weeks and featured ground-breaking evidence, including one of the first uses of chemical forensics in a US court case.

Messer-Kruse changed the Wikipedia article to reflect his knowledge of the case. Within ten minutes, though, another editor removed the additions, calling them “good faith but wholly unsourced revisions”. On various Wikipedia editorial pages Messer-Kruse pointed to primary sources from the trial supporting his version of affairs, and referred to his own published articles. Other contributors argued, though, that Wikipedia articles are meant to reflect the majority view of published sources, even when that view may be inaccurate. As Wikipedia contributor Gwen Gale wrote at the time, “If most secondary sources which are taken as reliable happen to repeat a flawed account or description of something, Wikipedia will echo that.”

In the On the Media interview aired this week Messer-Kruse noted, “[Wikipedia has] a culture that you need to be persistent. You need to suggest changes and if they’re rejected you need to go back at it again.” He is not the first to note that Wikipedia has its own particular culture (compare Amichai-Hamburger et al. 2008; Lam et al. 2011, inter alia), one that tends to discourage many people from contributing, including many whose knowledge or expertise could improve the online encyclopedia. Yet Johnstone’s experience suggests that expert knowledge is appreciated, at least when offered on Wikipedia’s own, sometimes prickly, terms.

Messer-Kruse argued at On the Media, “There are some types of information which simply don’t suit themselves to crowd-sourcing, and I would say that historical scholarship is one of those.” Yet Johnstone’s experience with the Pittsburgh English page shows that simple crowd-sourcing of data is not what Wikipedia is doing. As The Atlantic’s Rosen points out, what was at issue in editing “Haymarket affair” was not empirical data but scholarly interpretation. By Messer-Kruse’s own account, the ‘wrong’ interpretation – that the prosecutor did not tie the defendants to the bombing – has been accepted wisdom for more than a century. “The process of how history is taught and revised over time is a slow one, whether in a book, online, or in people’s minds,” says Rosen. “If Wikipedia hesitated to change its article ahead of the scholarly consensus, that is an artifact of academia’s own inability to quickly adopt a new consensus, not a failing of Wikipedia.”

*This or similar wording remained until 2012, but has recently been changed.

Amichai-Hamburger,Yair, Naama Lamdan, Rinat Madiel & Tsahi Hayat. 2008. Personality characteristics of Wikipedia members. CyberPsychology & Behavior 11(6), 679-681.

Johnstone, Barbara. 2011. Making Pittsburghese: Communication technology, expertise, and the discursive construction of a regional dialect. Language & Communication 31, 3-15.

Lam, Shyong (Tony) K., Anuradha Uduwage, Zhenhua Dong, Shilad Sen, David R. Musicant, Loren Terveen & John Riedl. 2011. WP:Clubhouse?: An exploration of Wikipedia’s gender imbalance. In Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, 1-10. Mountain View, CA: ACM.

Messer-Kruse, Timothy. 12 February 2012. The ‘undue weight’ of truth on Wikipedia. The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Rosen, Rebecca. 16 February 2012. Does Wikipedia have an accuracy problem? The Atlantic.

The AAA’s registration waiver program provides registration and membership fee waivers for qualified scholars. Qualifying scholars are: 1) individuals, regardless of academic degree, who bring a perspective to Meetings valued by the nominating Section; and 2) individuals asked to participate in a proposed event or Invited Session sponsored by your Section. Qualifying scholars may be employed outside the United States or Canada as practicing or university-based anthropologists in any of the discipline’s four main subfields (archaeology, sociocultural, biological, linguistic) but they cannot be employed as practicing or university-based anthropologists in the United States or Canada. Qualifying scholars need not be current AAA members.

To apply, please send the following information to Jocelyn Ahlers, SLA Program Committee Chair (jahlers@csusm.edu), no later than March 21, 2012.
1) a description of the proposed Section-sponsored or Section-invited session;
2) the name, affiliation, phone number, work address, and email contact information for the qualifying scholar(s) nominated to receive the Section’s waiver;
3) a short description of the scholar’s proposed role in the Section Invited Session or Section-sponsored event;
4) and her or his credentials and qualifications (i.e., non-anthropologist, community-based scholar, international scholar, etc).