Tom: You got dances, too? Caretaker: We got the best dances in the county every Saturday night. Tom: Say, who runs this place? Caretaker: The government. — The Grapes of Wrath, 1940 (screenplay by Nunnally Johnson) “I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and […]
Geoffrey Nunberg
Geoffrey Nunberg is a senior researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford. His most recent book is The Way We Talk Now.
Posted inSpecial Report
Privatization and the English Language
The art of building consensus out of the “vague and confusing medley” of individual opinions, Walter Lippmann wrote in The Phantom Public, consists in narrowing issues to a few simplified alternatives that can be reduced to “symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached from their ideas.” It would be hard to go any […]
Posted inSpecial Report
Speech Impediments
For a lesson in how the right uses language to shape political perceptions, consider the television ad that the archconservative Club for Growth ran during the Iowa caucuses. An announcer asks a middle-aged couple leaving a barbershop what they think of “Howard Dean’s plans to raise taxes on families by $1,900 a year.” The man […]
Posted inFeatures
The Liberal Label
“The masquerade is over; it’s time to … use the dreaded ‘L’ word, to say the policies of our opposition … are liberal, liberal, liberal.” — Ronald Reagan, 1988 Since the 1930s, the landscape of American political discourse has been framed by the words liberal versus conservative. In this era, U.S. commentators first began to […]
Posted inArticle
Still Unbiased:
My American Prospect study of press labeling continues to evoke responses from conservatives vexed by the finding that the press actually labels liberals more often than those on the right. In a lot of cases the objections are pure bluster. For example, Andrew Sullivan writes: I ignored Geoffrey Nunberg’s piece in the American Prospect in […]
Posted inArticle
Label Whores, Take Two:
My recent article on media bias [“Label Whores: Bernard Goldberg may not be wrong about the presence of bias in the media — he’s just wrong that it’s ‘liberal,’” TAP, May 6, 2002] touched a number of conservative nerves, as people variously disputed or pooh-poohed my finding that the average liberal has a thirty percent […]
Posted inFeatures
Media: Label Whores
Listening to people complain about bias in the media, you’re reminded that there is more than one paranoid style in American politics. While the left has busied itself unpacking interlocking directorates and corporate ownership, the right has made a specialty of close reading, with an extraordinary attentiveness to the nuances of usage and address. There’s […]
Posted inFeatures
Will the Internet Always Speak English?
In 1898, when Otto von Bismarck was an old man, a journalist asked him what he took to be the decisive factor in modern history. He answered, “The fact that the North Americans speak English.” In retrospect, he was spot on the mark about the political and economic developments of the twentieth century, and up […]
Posted inEnergy and the Environment
Will Libraries Survive?
Rumors of the death of the brick-and-mortar library have been greatly exaggerated. Yes, the digital age has transformed the nature of data storage. But the public library will be a chief agent in providing access to digital information.
Posted inFeatures
The Internet Filter Farce
W hat if the baseball could repair the window?” reads the headline of a recent ad for myCIO.com. The copy continues: “The Internet caused the problem. It’s only fitting it should also provide the solution.” As it happens, the advertiser is offering remote management of network security. But the slogan would serve just as well […]