Disappearing, and being disappeared

The verb disappear is normally what we call 'intransitive', which means that it has one participant: the person who disappears. Like this: 

The leftovers disappeared. 

If anything follows the word disappear, it's either some extra optional information, or it's a continuation of the discourse and the 'disappear' phrase is done: 

The leftovers disappeared overnight. 

The leftovers disappeared, which I'm very annoyed about because I was going to have them for lunch today. 

If we want to talk about more than one participant, like if we have both the thing that disappears and also someone who causes the disappearing to happen, we have to add in another word, make: 

The kitchen staff made the leftovers disappear. 

English being the flexible language that it is, you can find examples of 'transitive' disappear, which is when we just put the two participants of the action right there with the verb: 

VICE has disappeared the post from its website (from M-W)

But English also being the kind of language that doesn't like redundancy (this is all languages tbh), because we already have a way of doing this with make, the 'cause to disappear' meaning takes on a more specialist meaning than the other one, so that they are distinct in their function as well as their form. Content warning now for examples relating to war and dictatorships. Here's some more examples from Merriam-Webster: 

Her son was disappeared during Argentina's so-called Dirty War.

Under his repressive regime, tens of thousands of Chileans were 'disappeared', tortured and killed. 

It [Nineteen Eighty-Four] imagines a secretive regime that surveils its people and polices even their thoughts, disappearing anyone who rebels against the order. 

It has taken on this specialised meaning of the imprisonment or killing of political dissidents. 

Perhaps, if you're paying close attention, you might notice that only the last one actually has two participants mentioned: the 'secretive regime' and 'anyone who rebels'. The others only mention the person who disappeared. But here we have an exception that proves the rule, because these are passive sentences (He was disappeared vs The government disappeared him). You can only make a passive sentence with a transitive verb, because to do so you need to promote the object (the thing the verb happens to) to be the subject of the sentence: 

I (subject) ate the leftovers (object).

The leftovers were eaten. 

You can't do it with a sentence with only one participant to begin with, because then there's no object to promote. Or, if you prefer, you can, but by doing so you're adding in another understood participant: 

Not passive, one participant: The boat sank (perhaps with no particular cause). 

Passive: The boat was sunk (by someone in particular, though we aren't told who). 

While it is true to say that the political dissidents disappeared, it is more informative to say that they were disappeared, because it informs us of the involvement of a third party who deliberately caused this 'disappearance'. 

There is no doubt in my mind

Today, most schools in England (and I think maybe other parts of the UK, but I'm less sure about that) were due to go back. Some are closed, like in our area, because of high rates of the coronavirus. Others are supposed to be open but the teaching unions are advising teachers that they should not go in, and that schools should not open, because it's not safe. This is going to be an interesting day because the Conservative government *hates* unions - they consistently work to disempower them, and pursue a rhetoric of unions as troublemakers and working against the interests of the public, which I suppose plays well with their voters, who are less likely to be in unions themselves. So we'll see how it plays out when those schools don't open today despite the Prime Minister saying on television yesterday that parents should send their children to school. 

He said 'There is no doubt in my mind that schools are safe'. I would say that this is untrue, but actually I can't say that: what is untrue is the embedded proposition Schools are safe. His utterance, There is no doubt in my mind that schools are safe is an assertion about his belief, and it may well be true. Maybe he has convinced himself that schools actually have loads of space for social distancing and children are capable of not being tiny infection-spreaders, in the context of a new variant that spreads especially well among children. If pressed, I'm sure he would utter the statement that Schools are safe, and then the truth of that utterance would be a matter of fact, not his belief, and it would be true if schools did not present an increased risk (or any risk? what does 'safe' really mean?) of contracting the virus, which at present is not the case. Teachers have been saying all through the holiday that there is not enough space to provide enough distance, and in any case it's not at all clear that such distancing measures are effective. Scientists are also advising that schools don't open. 

It puts the statements from my own employer into perspective, anyway. The message from them is that 'Campus is 100% safe' and 'Campus is covid-secure'. This is also not strictly true: there is no way at all to ensure that it's covid-secure, as you can't control what people do, and it's totally possible that someone could catch the virus and then come to campus and run up and cough in people's faces, or that people might not follow the rules and then come and sit in a classroom for two hours the next day. What they mean is that they've put processes in place to make it *as safe as possible*. Nothing is 100% safe, of course. '100% safe' in this context means something like 'We have done 100% of the things in our power to make the campus comply with government advice'. And for us, that does mean that we can use bigger rooms to teach, and we can open windows and doors in many of those rooms, and we are able to teach remotely if need be. Schools don't have any of those things (many can teach remotely but they point is they're not being allowed to), so if it doesn't seem quite true that my campus is safe, then it's definitely not true that schools are safe. But the fact remains that Johnson's statement, There is no doubt in my mind that schools are safe, may well be true, because he is capable of believing (or convincing himself he believes) utterly outlandish nonsense. 

I declare this blog post to be interesting

Donald Trump lost the US election last week to Joe Biden. You might have missed it, it's not like it was literally all anyone was talking about all week. We even stopped talking about coronavirus for a bit. One of the things that characterised his unhinged campaign was an insistence on the election being fraudulent, and also that he had definitely got more votes. Because of the way the system works over there, states are 'called' for one or the other candidate once it's past reasonable doubt about who will win (e.g. the number of votes still to count isn't enough to change the current outcome). This means that anyone could call a state early, and they might be right, because it's 50/50, but they might also be wrong because they're just guessing, so you want to look at the basis on which they're calling it. 

Trump tweeted this, and Twitter immediately marked it as false or misleading: 

We have claimed, for Electoral Vote purposes, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (which won’t allow legal observers) the State of Georgia, and the State of North Carolina, each one of which has a BIG Trump lead. Additionally, we hereby claim the State of Michigan if, in fact,.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 4, 2020

You can see he uses the word hereby in his claim for Michigan, which adds an air of authority and legality to the claim, although no actual legality of course. 

Hereby is a word meaning 'as a result of this utterance', so if you say I hereby declare this play park open, then you have opened the play park by uttering those words. You can also, if invested with the right authority, hereby forbid barbecues in this area before 6pm. This is what's known as a 'performative' speech act, because by uttering the thing, you are performing that act: claiming, declaring, promising, naming, and so on. Hereby is useful for legal documents, because it also means 'as a result of this document', so it means something like 'by signing this document you agree to this rule', and also that if the document is later overturned, so too is the thing that was hereby excluded/forbidden/claimed. 

In everyday speech it's actually less useful because the verb does most of the work, and the legality or validity is provided by the situation. If you don't have the right authority, you can of course still declare it, forbid it, whatever, but it doesn't have legal standing. So if you stand in your neighbour's garden and hereby declare that this is your property, it doesn't magically become your property. However, you have still declared it, and you would have even if you hadn't said hereby. There is no difference between 1 and 2 except for some posturing, and perhaps an implication that you're just now claiming it in (1), whereas in (2) perhaps there is some prior claim on it that you're bringing up now (it was promised to you by the host earlier on, perhaps). Your claim being upheld is dependent on the agreement of your friends. Similarly, there's no difference between (3) and (4), and the validity of your declaration is dependent only on you being some local dignity who's been asked to officially open the shopping centre; it isn't open if you just pass by a half-built complex and shout this at your friend. 

1. I hereby claim this last slice of pizza. 
2. I claim this last slice of pizza.
3. I hereby declare this shopping centre open. 
4. I declare this shopping centre open.

In a sentence like the one in my post's title, where I declare something subjective, then the validity is dependent on people agreeing with me. This is why statements like this are better if they declare something objective, but are also used to give additional (sometimes false) weight to opinions or baseless claims. My post might be dull as anything, or only some people might agree, but me declaring it to be interesting sounds like I have some authority to make a factual statement about it. 

So Trump claims Georgia and North Carolina just as much as he does Michigan, even though he doesn't say hereby for those ones, and the speech act is the same. The legality or validity of it is dependent not on his claiming them, but on the number of votes counted. At the time of writing, the former two are still not called by Associated Press, and of course his claim for Michigan came with a big censored 'if' clause about voter fraud, so no doubt he will be pursuing that one. 

Panic! in the pandemic

I had my first social distancing argument on Saturday. As I was queuing to pay for kippers at my local farm shop, a woman who apparently had no concept of personal space, never mind pandemic space, was right up behind me. I took a step forward, and she closed the gap again. Then I asked her to keep her distance (politely, I thought), and she sneered at me, shook her head, and told me not to panic. Panic! 

Panic, which I just now learnt is named after the god Pan, who'd shout when he woke from his naps and make the sheep scatter in fright, is a sudden fear provoking anxiety so strong it causes a fight-or-flight response. If you've ever had a panic attack, you'll know how strong a physical experience it is. Even if we're not using the medical or scientific definition, but a looser sense, it's still a pretty physical thing involving running about, not thinking straight, irrational decisions, things like that. 

Panic is not politely asking people to follow the guidelines we've been told to follow in order to stem a pandemic. (Pandemic is not named after Pan, sadly.) It's not a sustained, reasoned, relatively calm course of action. Yes, those of us keeping distance from others may be feeling anxiety, but it's not the sudden desire to flee and shortness of breath and racing heartbeat of panic. 

I've heard this word used a lot about people's rational (to me) responses to the pandemic, though, generally from right-wing or anti-lockdown or anti-mask commenters. They are the ones who think the virus isn't that bad, and that we should just go on as normal, perhaps 'protecting the vulnerable'. If you have this view, then a more appropriate word than 'panic' would be 'over-reaction'. 

Using the word 'panic' is just like when you're having an argument with someone and they say 'you're being hysterical', whereupon the correct response is to shriek 'I'm NOT being hysterical' and storm out slamming the door behind you. It makes you seem unreliable and undermines your actions, making them seem ridiculous or unreasonable. It's a dirty, underhand tactic but it works well. 

And yes, when the woman said that to me, I replied 'I'm NOT panicking' and stormed out. 

No deal is better than a bad deal

My friend Michelle reminded me that Theresa May said this back in January, and has kept on saying it since then. Most people have been non-pedantic enough to let it go by without comment (after all, there's enough politics happening for us to talk about) but she, I and Chris Maslanka in the Guardian all noticed that it was ambiguous.

Negation, as I've mentioned in previous posts, is usually ambiguous because it takes scope over different bits of the sentence it's in. Here's Chris Maslanka's explanation of the two meanings:

Incidentally, there's a long bit in Alice Through The Looking Glass (or the other one) where a messenger pouts that 'nobody walks faster than I do' and the king says 'he can't, or he'd be here already'. Lewis Carroll was keen on logic and semantics jokes.

After some back and forth with my colleague (& friend) Christina, we think we've translated the two meanings into what looks like gibberish to non-linguists, but is actually a formal representation of the meaning. The notation explains how the bits of the sentence interact to give two different meanings from the same set of words in the same order. I've translated them underneath into increasingly more idiomatic English.

The meaning Theresa means, presumably, is this:

∀x∀y.[NO.DEAL(x) & BAD.DEAL(y) -> x > y]

(Roughly,

"For all x and for all y, if x is no deal and y is a bad deal, then x is better than y"
or "If x is no deal and y is a bad deal, then x is better than y"
or "Having no deal at all is better than having a bad deal".)

Whereas the meaning that's much more salient to me, and which made the sentence seem quite bizarre, is this one:

 ~∃x.[DEAL(x) & ∃y.[BAD.DEAL(y) & x > y] ]

(Roughly,

"There is no x such that x is a deal and there is some y such that y is a bad deal and x is better than y"
or "There is no deal which is better than a bad deal"
or "A bad deal is the best deal".)

Incidentally, I'm pretty sure that this particular type of negation scope ambiguity is regional - it seems less obvious to US speakers (see this post and the comments). But that's a purely anecdotal observation so do let me know if you have anecdata to add to that.

Who are men?

News changes quickly at the moment and this article from last Friday is already well out of date. However, it contains an interesting turn of phrase.

It's about having a female Prime Minister, and being female in politics. It says this:

Even now women who choose politics have to decide how to define themselves in the context of gender in a way that would seem bizarre for men (although familiar enough to politicians from black and minority ethnic backgrounds). 

If I'm being generous, I'll say that it's contrasting women with men, and white people with people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, and these two groups cross-cut each other (you can be both or neither).

If I'm not being generous, I'd say that 'men' here refers to 'white men', given that otherwise there's a weird contrast in that 'men' would find this situation bizarre but 'politicians from black and minority ethnic backgrounds', who are likely to be men, wouldn't.

OK, intersectionality is hard, and we haven't mentioned the fact that plenty of other sorts of people would recognise this disparity, but it is possible to avoid clumsiness like this.

Lies and lying by implication

The UK voted (by a narrow majority) to leave the EU this week. I am furious about this and terrified about what it says about us as a country and what it means for our future, both as a country and for me personally. Nevertheless, life goes on, so here's an EU referendum-themed blog post on lies and lying by implicature (meaning beyond what is said).

A lot of the debate raged around the figure of £350million, which was claimed by the Leave campaign to be the weekly amount the UK spends on the EU. This figure is itself not actually accurate, and it was quoted even more inaccurately (I heard it mentioned as the daily amount, for instance), but the main deception here was the idea that this £350million a week would be spent on the NHS if we voted to leave the EU. Immediately after the result was announced, Nigel Farage said that this promise would not be kept and that if you voted for Leave on that basis it was 'a mistake'. This was no surprise to those of us who knew that there was no £350million a week, or to people like me who assume that Farage is lying every time he says anything, but a large proportion of the 17million Leave voters did apparently believe this promise from a politician with no ability to enact anything.

After the result and subsequent backtracking, people said things like 'no one ever promised that £350million would be spent on the NHS'. Other people responded like this:

This makes that point that they did indeed say that they would do exactly this. Here, it's absolutely impossible for it to be read any other way:

Pronouns are notoriously slippery little buggers and their meaning is entirely context dependent. They refer back to something in the discourse, and what that referent is depends partly on some syntactic constraints but mostly on whatever is the most recent possible referent. Here, it's more or less impossible to interpret 'it' as referring to anything other than the £350million:

(It could do, if that ellipsis included some other referent. Imagine: 'Every week we send £350m to Brussels. I only get £5 pocket money per week, but I would spend it on the NHS.')

Here, the Leavers have some wriggle room: nowhere do they actually state they'll spend the £350m on the NHS:

They merely make the point that we spend £350million on the EU, and that we should spend some unspecified amount on the NHS instead. If we put an extra fiver into the NHS, that would technically be fulfilling this. Not only that, they don't even promise to do it (which they can't anyway): they say Let's, which is a suggestion (a 'hortative'). A hortative has no truth conditions, which means it can't be true or false, and it certainly isn't equivalent in truth conditions to 'We will spend £350million a week on the NHS'.

However, this is a sticky legalese way of getting out of it. If you write two sentences on the side of your battle bus (actually, they're one sentence, but an ungrammatical one - they need some punctuation in there), it's entirely reasonable for people to assume that they're related. It would be disingenuous and misleading to say that the 'fund' in the second clause does not have any relation to the '£350million' in the first, and I would consider that lying by implicature.

El Gato, the nameless cat

It was revealed last week that Jeremy Corbyn's cat does not have a name, and he simply calls it 'el gato'. Or is that El Gato? It was in an interview with the Independent, and you can't hear capital letters, so we may never know. Perhaps it doesn't matter. But perhaps it does!

El Gato, the cat. 

Corbyn himself appears to regard this as not a name, as he goes on to talk about how cats don't know their own names anyway. However, El Gato could be a perfectly good name, if he chooses to think of it that way. Yes, it means 'the cat', but we can use common nouns as proper nouns quite easily. My friend does exactly this, as her car is nicknamed El Gato. Another friend's mother has a cat whose name is The Little Cat. Ella Fitzgerald and all the other Ellas are just called 'her', by the same token, but we think of it as a name. Adam West and all the other Adams are just called 'man', but again, no problem here.

Redefining objectively defined facts

In the budget yesterday, the Chancellor, George Osborne, announced a new National Living Wage which will replace the National Minimum Wage. It's a bit higher, at £7.20/hour from April compared to the current NMW of £6.50. This is to reflect the fact that the minimum wage is not a 'living wage'.

Except of course this is ridiculous. This is an astonishingly audacious misuse of names of things.

The National Minimum Wage is whatever the government says it is. It's the minimum that companies are legally allowed to pay their employees who are aged over 21. It could be £1.50 or it could be £25 - it's not related to anything in particular. The living wage is a measure of how much money is required to live on, and it's based on the actual cost of living in the UK (currently £7.85, or more in London). That means that you simply can't introduce a 'living wage' that is anything other than the actual living wage. If you do, you're just using a name for one thing to label an entirely different thing. This is at best a bit daft and at worst deliberately deceitful. He might as well have just promised everyone a kitten and then introduced a new tax called a Kitten.

It's so brazen. Already there's a #CallingThingsTheLivingWageThatArent hashtag.

(For those who prefer their wages conceptualised as an annual salary, the current NMW is about £12,500 (£11,500 after tax) and the current living wage - the real one, not the made up one - is about £15,000 (£13,300 after tax).)

Coloured people and People of Colour

Might as well join in with the Cumberbashing, as I've got nowt else better to do.

So today Benedict Cumberbatch is all over the news for a relatively innocuous slip up. I say innocuous, because it wasn't as bad as various other much worse things people have been saying recently (and say in real life every day), but it is of course still important to point out when people in the public eye use terminology that is offensive or inappropriate.

In this case, it can't be that offensive because all the newspapers have repeated the word he used: 'coloured', to refer to black actors who aren't getting the jobs they ought to. For context, this was until relatively recently the correct term to use, and grandparents are still apt to use it thinking it's the right word. However, either it was never right and now we know better, or else language has changed, because now it sounds really inappropriate and not at all the right word to use.

But ANYWAY even though clearly Cumberbatch was being a good person and pointing out racial inequality and calling for change, the media has stirred up a great big fuss over it (which I'm now contributing to, sorry) and people have got their knickers in a twist over 'political correctness gone mad'.

Sigh.

Firstly, this is not PC language. Or rather, it is, but only in the sense that PC means 'not being a dick'. It's really basic courtesy to not offend people more than you absolutely have to. If it's a simple matter of using a different word, that's not such a hardship. Secondly, it's not about deliberately finding new PC terms to use to deliberately make bigots' life harder. Language changes. Deal with it.

But I was wondering about the people complaining about overly-sensitive people getting offended by what they perceive as such a little thing. Probably some people were offended, but most do not appear to have been. There are not lots of people on the internet talking about boycotting his films, or even criticising him beyond a gentle reprimand. These people who are whinging about sensitive souls are saying we should consider his intentions, which were clearly good. This is true, we should do, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't also politely point out that he should not use that language. After all, no matter that the word is not as offensive as 'the n-word'; the unnoticed undermining of a person's identity by the almost unnoticed use of language by lots of generally right-thinking people is as important as the idiots using obviously offensive slurs. If it goes under the radar, it's more likely to go unchallenged and become part of the way we think about things.

Anyway I don't know what my point was, really, beyond a general moan that PC language ought to be a good thing but is only ever used in a negative way.

Helping 'them'

You'll probably have seen this by now:

It's - I was astonished to discover - not a parody. It's real. Not a parody. A real image produced by the Conservatives to publicise the benefits of their recent budget to 'hardworking people'. As you can see from the poster, this amounts to reducing the cost of bingo and beer. 

Actually, I have no opinion about bingo tax, but scrapping the beer escalator is a good thing, as far as I can tell, as it reduces the financial strain on smaller breweries. It doesn't actually help any individual drinkers, though, as they've only taken a penny off the price of a pint. Even I don't drink that many pints. I estimate I'd be better off by about £12 a year if the brewers passed the penny saving on to my local and my local passed on this penny saving to me (just kidding - that's how much better off I'd be if I drank 100 pints a month, which I don't. Honest). 

Anyway, the shocking fact that the Tories have done something right amongst all the wrong things they've done is beside the point. This is a linguistics blog, not a beer blog. There is so much wrong with this poster that I can't address it all, but there are two things about it that I will mention: the phrase 'hardworking people' and the pronoun 'they'. 

'Hardworking people' is an unfortunately overused phrase among all the major parties. I have no idea what it means or who it refers to. I'm a hardworking person. Is it me? Maybe. Are the Conservative MPs themselves 'hardworking people'? I'm sure they'd like to think so, but the wording of this poster doesn't seem to say so (more on that shortly, when we come to 'they'). Unfortunately, beer and bingo are stereotypical pursuits of the working class, and I fear that this is what they mean this time by 'hardworking people'. In this sense, it's very much a euphemism, because 'working class' really means 'poor people' and there are rather a lot of people currently out of work and therefore not doing very much 'work' at all. Whether they're drinking beer and playing bingo, I don't know. 

So, 'they'. Owen Jones in the Guardian describes this as 'the fatal pronoun'. 

The fatal pronoun is "they": it looks like a conscious attempt by well-heeled Tories to distance themselves from the great unwashed, who are presumably all getting hammered in bingo halls. This is the real "plebgate".

They is a versatile little word. It's very useful as a gender-neutral alternative to he and she, handy when you don't know someone's gender or would rather not specify one of those two. In its 'usual' use, as here, it's the third person plural pronoun, in nominative case (ie the one used as the subject of the sentence). It refers to some group of people who include neither the speaker nor the hearer. And that, perhaps, is the problem here. Clearly, the Conservatives (the 'speaker' of this sentence) do not consider themselves to be among 'the hardworking people', but neither do they consider the reader (the 'hearer' of the sentence) to be 'hardworking people' either. So who are 'they'? The 'little people', those who well-meaning people would like to help but really aren't one of us at all. 

The alternatives are no good either, by the way: the first of these is better, but still feels patronising, and the second is just clearly nonsense. 

'To help hardworking people to do more of the things you enjoy.' 

'To help hardworking people to do more of the things we enjoy.' 

Active voice allows speaker to hide agency

People often get over-excited about politicians using the 'passive voice' to hide their errors. There was an example of just this in last week's Fry's Planet Word, when Armando Iannucci (the famous linguist....oh no wait, he's a comedy writer) said that politicians say things like

Mistakes were made

and he, much amused and outraged, hooted

By who?

OK, that is a terrible way to apologise for anything, and it doesn't fool anyone. If people even say that kind of thing any more they're idiots. But the point is that it's not the passive that causes agency (the person who did the thing) to be hidden - you can easily say

The cakes for this week's charity sale were all eaten by me, and I'm very sorry.

Geoff Pullum has ranted about this much more extensively and accurately than I can, and he has myriad examples of stupidity. So on to the topical bit.