The public to your cause! Meanwhile, a more temperate opponent of the There's nothing like references to puritanical persecutors to rally Pay for it at the ballot box in November." To be branded with a scarlet letter, 'A' for amnesty, and they need to "Anybody that votes for an amnesty bill deserves To equate "amnesty" with another notorious A-word: Temerity to claim that he's not "playing around demagogically with the To provide a "standard definition.") And after all that, he has the But then after taking this populist, ColbertesqueĪpproach to language, he changes his tune and appeals to the "standardĭefinition of the word." (I'm surprised that Sessions, wryly identifiedīy Milbank as "the Alabama lexicographer," didn't pull out a dictionary
"amnesty," it's still close enough to the popular conception of the It's not amnesty, it's the same thing as amnesty." I suppose he meansĮven if the bill doesn't fit some narrow legalistic definition of
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the exquisite logic of "If I know that's a loaded word, and I don't want to be playing around By any standard definition of the word 'amnesty,' this bill has it. If it's not amnesty, it's the same thing as amnesty. "In every sense of what people mean by amnesty,
Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), bulldozed through any pesky To invoke the scary "A-word" whenever possible, while supporters insist that theīill promotes not "amnesty" but "earned citizenship." One vocal Opponents of the bill are doing their best ( link) Linguists note that the question, "Who lied in George Bush's State of the Union speech" bears a certain resemblance to the famous conundrum, "Who is buried in Grant's Tomb?" They speculate that the two questions may have parallel answers.ĭebate over a Senate bill to legalize illegal immigrants hasĭevolved into squabbling over the word "amnesty," Dana Milbank reports [A web search does suggest that this is not the only case where Kinsley has drafted linguists into rhetorical service for example:
So if you think that you can reassure me by explaining what Kinsley was getting at, please let me know, and I'll tell the world. This worries me, though perhaps it shouldn't. No, I'm afraid that I can't make any sense at all of the progression of ideas in the paragraph that I've quoted. Or does Kinsley assume that the field of linguistics bears overall responsibility for judging the connections between words and things, so that the last slim thread tying journalists to the pretense of rationality is a concern for how linguists will judge their work? If true, this would certainly favor my campaign to ensure that every civilized person is taught the basic concepts and techniques of linguistic analysis - but other disciplines also have a role to play in the game of truth and consequences, and I'm sure Kinsley knows that. If anything, my colleagues are all too confident that objective reality not only exists, but is firmly in their grasp. Is Kinsley using linguistics to represent those fields where the notion of objective reality has become unfashionable? I hope not, because linguists' failure to embrace PoMo attitudes has left them sadly estranged from academic humanists. But even within journalism, there are reassuring models of what a post-objective press might look like. Maybe it doesn't matter what linguists think. Would it be the end of the world if American newspapers abandoned the cult of objectivity? In intellectual fields other than journalism, the notion of an objective reality that words are capable of describing has been going ever more deeply out of fashion for decades. Of course it does, at least when the topic is language, but I'm having some trouble figuring out what Michael Kinsley means by raising the issue today in his musings on " The Twilight of Objectivity":
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