elsewhere in the world, the way you signal that you can have a certain kind of conversation when you're surrounded by other people who can't, you refer to one of the stars of new york musical theater by just their first name. if you say audra, bernadette, laura, you instantly know who you're talking to. i don't know if i've thought of that consciously, but it's that. they, and-- >> we'll break away from this program momentarily to take you live to the u.s. senate for what we expect to be a brief pro forma session and we'll return to this event shortly. ...

the presiding officer: the senate will come to order. the clerk will read a communication to the senate. the clerk: washington, d.c., october 18, 2024. to the senate: under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable george s. helmy, a senator from the state of new jersey, to perform the duties of the chair. signed: patty murray, president pro tempore. the presiding officer: under the previous order, the senate stands adjourned until 8:00 a.m., october 22, 2024. >> the senate meets next for votes on november 12. back now to our scheduled program. we join it in progress. >> if you like abusing language about the right is doing that. language and the right can

create great justice or for that matter injustice. have you given any thought about that? >> i'm going to give an honest answer to that, which is i don't have in my quiver a series of examples of that kind of abuse from the right because frankly to the extent of her problem with the left, right is in these days you can imagine i've got them, it is as much about language. i think all working an idea is one that is often been more embraced by the left than right because it offers a way of showing you understand indigenous cultures or cultures that are not based on written word as muchas as ours is, are equal to us. the truth is most of this is the left as i say to him both sides is out because certainly there are examples on the right that concern me less but that means i've got it covered and nobody can say i'm exaggerating. no, the left and right differs

in that way. there's plenty ofer rhetoric frm the right but much less of it is about know, call this, because that will give you the right kind of thought. rather it's just say certain things over and over again. >> so when trump has an ad which he puts out, put up two weeks ago, kamala is with a thin coat president trump is for you. that's very funny. >> that is very clever. >> it is very clever and i think it is, in fact, a a very clevd which i say is a politically neutral ways i can. is it fair? >> fair. >> politics. it's an ad. it's very clever. you put a sort of modified defense of vape them bears. >> in defense of that had is to demonstrate the people see

interest in them are for example, the ones or most dedicated to using they them rather than he and she as opposed to most people, i consider that to be clever and not slanderous in itself. frankly i don't think kamala harris set far left or at least is a friend herself that right now but, of course, trump ian's have a reason for wanting to make it seem like she is. so it is formally clever, someone not him thought that up. but if -- spry wonder what you think about how things are now as opposed to how they were at some distant or not so distant point in history, so chris started up a tall but 1984, three years before 1984 was published, that is to say in 1946m orwell wrote a famous essay politics and the english language, , nsa i commend to all of you. has a lot of problems but it is interesting and very famous

essay. in the first sentence orwell says something about the bad ways in which people are using english now. of course that happens generation after generation after generation. take one of the examples he goes after and remember this is 1946. he talks about the word fascism and he says fascism has no meaning anymore except insofar as it signals something not desirable. >> i think that'ss a direct quotation. >> s 1946.t if you want to know what fascism is that would be a good stage to think about. these days i'm called a fascist, your call a fascist. many people in the from are being called fascist all the time, completely unfairly. so is her difference? you have tonc jump off the word fascism that is her difference between how things are now on

the left or conceivably the right, now as opposed to 1946? or if you like, 1846 or 1746? >> i know what you mean. there is a surface different in that before roughly the late '60s come one was expected to be more careful inre one's public statements in terms of how you phrase things. at a lectern for example, as opposed to win you were just talking. you can love that or you can hate it, , but language wore a tie. language wore a tie when you -- >> not a modern. >> however, what we do tend to miss is we can't are people just talking as much a tour modern technology with only about 25 years ago. what or what gets to is if you were listening to the great buzz of language at the time you were hearing the same kind of sloppiness that we did it with

now. that is a you can use fascist, you can't use fascist wrong in print or sloppily in print but there's all sorts of examples. if you got warren harding just talking, apparently it was not a pleasant thing. he just kind of yammer along. h. l. mencken talked about how he spoke the worst english he's eversp known. there was a guy whose name escapes me right now, i candidate for mayor in new york city during the time of fear relative guardia who wasti known for being swivel talk. not famous now. is also probably never recorded in terms of his spoken word but if you see transcripts of things he said it just went from one thing to another, i don't like the weight trump is sometimes transcribed now. people talk that way then, too, but we can't see it in print because anything in print including the congressional record when they are reading from his formal. i don't these things are not new. with orwell you read that and

independent you might almost think taking 72 except he was dead because it is been thy it was for longer time. >> center talking typeface am going to throw in a tidy tantrum here and ask you about capitalization. oneg could imagine in print a scenario in which i am called a fascist come here called a i fascist and people decide to make that lowercase as opposed to somebody with a capital f. i'm riffing on black and black. any comments on any of that? >> i can deathly imaginesc it. i just gave at the "new york times" my editor, my wonderful editor said john, i know you don't like doing it but i always have to change it. could you please, , so now i'm doing it. that to me feels exactly like the changing of the word.

it had nothing to do with creating a change, of putting food into some is not forgetting anybody training. it's more of the euphemism treadmill and especially awkward in mostea people think you're nt supposed to capitalize white for the contingent reason that white nationalists like it. i haven't done it like with sweat rolling down my brow but once thinking that i thought no, i have written a lowercase all my life. i'm too busy think about what to write every damn week, i'm not going to capitalize it. but now at least for the times i'm going to. i'm not going to get in the have anywhere else but the sad thing is if i don't do it, if it's going anywhere but my desk, if it's going anywhere but my desk i making someone else do it for me. >> right. a couple things. this is being recorded so i hope this isn't wrong but it think the new edition of the chicago manual style says about white edition they came out a few weeks ago you can now one or the other i think.

i think they'rere being flexibl. >> so what is assuming -- some are saying you should do it or at least you might consider doing. this is one of these cases that is, well, changing as we speak i didn't like african-american. i thought i'm not african and so now wee have so many people come from after that it gets confusing and then some lily white person from south africa says i'm african-american. i did like that then. i want to stick with black and lower case. the old days were better. but here we are. >> not so modern at all. >> they were different. >> let's go back to the year times. actually the atlantic also capitalizes black. >> are they doing the? >> i think so. i believe there are pieces by you that are lowercase and then you wrote the same piece in the

atlantic. there it was capitalize. >> so the real question is, which i like to ask you, sort of meddling question, the great thing about being a linguist, or the terrifying thing about being a linguist, is, one of them is you are what you eat. if you write about politics, you are writing about politics. if you're right about language, you are using language to do it. so you in a kind of double bind. e for -- what do editors tell you to do? are there publications where you have great freedom to say what you want and to say it in the way you want? and others in which you don't? i'm not asking you to throw various editors here under the bus exactly, though you're welcome to do so. what does that look like in a world in which language is as heavily policed, if i can use that word, policed, at least on

the left, as what we have right now. john: that's a great question. i don't get asked much about my writing. people think you have an opinion and it jumps out of your head and you type it. it used to be that i couldn't get away with even the old singular they. telling students they can hand in their paper when they want to they used to correct that. once i got past 50, i started saying, i've been in this business a while. i'm a linguist. this rule makes no sense. i'd like you to let me say they. this is before the roberta is getting their hair cut day. i think that came because i got a little older. one thing that's especially fris traiting, and this is not any particular person. actually a lot of it comes from that, you were saying the es kay from orrwell has problems, is that there's something wrong with the passive voice if you put something in a passive voice

you're making a weaker statement. some of that is strunk & white, and the history of that thing, one teacher at cornell with a little mustache and a lot of teeth wrote about how he thought about language, and e.b. white liked it and made it a book. strunc has been dead for 300 years. so you don't want to write in all passive but the reason you don't want to write in all passive, things about getting language across that are subtle and quite useful and i wish it weren't thought of, lots of editors, as a kind of a responsibility of making writing good to have the passive voice used as little as possible. because we're such -- if it were such a bad thing why do we have it and that one i find is very hard to get people to let go of.

joshua: you wish people thought of it or people would think of it john: i wish it were thought of. joshua: the last time we had a public conversation, at columbia, three or so weeks after october 7. things were very bad. they were very bad at clumia and so here we are almost a year later. i wonder if you have any comments about what has happened post-october 7 in particular to the use of language, and also, although linguists often don't like to make prediction, you did make one or two up there just now, what do you think the next year is going to look like? john: to be perfectly honest, thank the lord, i'm on sabbatical all year so i don't have to worry about it. i can be at home. of course i'm going to learn about all sorts of things going on. i think the -- a lesson that's been learned for better or for

worse is the nature of what we're going to think of free speech as being. i think that's in the column of mine that dropped today. to be on that campus, columbia, god love columbia but it's the size of this room. and so if there are protests, they're everywhere. it's not just on one part of campus and you can go to the other side to listen to the kinds of dialogue that there's been and the whole question as to whether it's anti-semitic, etc., where do you draw the line. learning that there's going to be some of that and there's a meaning of free speech, then jewish students have to get used to hearing a certain amount of that sort of thing within certain parameters. that's not something i think college students have had a that rapid a lesson about in a long time if ever, and it's something i have to think a lot about. my position has always been if

anybody on a campus said "d.e.i. has got to die," two times, much less for a half-hour, they'd be sent somewhere else. that relates to law school profess professor amy wachs. how much invective are groups exped to listen to in the name of free speech? though the atmosphere at columbia was acrid to say the least, i think there's been almost, think of it as eating your vegetables, a lesson in what free speech really means in the nastiness of what's going on there. joshua: can you tell us a little bit more about what a linguist's view is, either your view as you or your view as a linguistic expert about free speech on campus.

john: this goes beyond anything a linguist thinks about, just me trying to think about and listen to the right things. you borrow from the -- bar from the notion of free speech not only crying out in a theater that classic idea, but sustained, direct atabs on individuals cannot by thought of as just free speech. constant, overt discriminatory exclamations are not to be thought of as free speech. this is common in free speech code but it's one of these where to do -- where do you draw the line? i remember one night, had a late class. i happened to be with two students who were jewish. we walked out of the building, there's a line of people going by. lights, posters, yelling from the river to the sea. i remember thinking, they have to hear this. one of them was better equipped to do it than the other. they have to listen to this all day long is this free speech or is this too much? it's a tough one and then i thought to myself how would i

feel listening to d.e.i. has got to die, d.e.i. has got to die, or something more trenchant. i thought it wouldn't bother me because there's a part of me that's kind of interior but that's a configuration of neurons. that's not something everybody has. it's a disadvantage to me sometimes. and i thought i don't know. back then i thought i don't know. today i would say, if there was a certain amount of that sort of speech being leveled by a certain group black kids, i would hope if it went too far, if it not up in your -- if it didn't go too far, if it wasn't up in your face, i would hope they could withstand it. but i'm thinking about arrogant, cocky me and i have to get out of him and think about someone else. it's been very difficult to wrap your head around it. especially because, as i'm sure

you know, most people in that debate know what they know. it all comes down to one thing and there are no questions. the hardest philosophical question i've known in my lifetime. that won't do for me it's difficult. it's hard. joshua: i wonder if we can talk more about students on campus at the moment. your atlantic colleague, rose horowitz, wrote a piece two days ago about how students at elite campuses no longer read they no longer read at all. there are of course lots of articles about this sort of thing. there have been for decades, and hundreds of years too but this one is quite damning. there's a quote in that article, he says students come in with a narrower vocabulary than they used to. that strikes me as correct. you may disagree but that strikes me as correct. the other thing he says is that they have, quote, less

understanding of language than they used to. and i wonder about that. i wonder whether we could talk a bit about whether it's the case that many of the things that you decry and that many people in this room decry are actually a result of not understanding language or whether it actually could be something like the opposite they understand all too well what it is that they can do if they manipulate language. that's what they do. john: i read that piece. it occurred to me, i used to teach contemporary civilization in the core curriculum at columbia, that was teaching philosophy and poli sci juniors for me. i haven't done that for 10 years now. 10 years ago was when a certain tick was just beginning. everything changed in 2013. there was a sea change because

of iphones and also twitter and facebook had become default, especially twitter. that generation started in 2013. and nowadays, my particular courses don't leave me assigning students whole books. but i would say, maybes that just -- this is just because i'm at columbia, maybe other columbia professors would say differently, a couple did in the article, i don't notice any difference in the usage of language from 2008 when i was there, certainly among some students there's a sense that using certain words is politics. and that, i remember noticing that even before 2013 around thinking, lohr rain handsberry and martin luther king wouldn't recognize. this this is a new way of using language. not harmful but a new way. but definitely i can say this. 2009, if i had a bright student, and they wanted to know about something, i would tell them, and it was me imitating jaques

barzon who in his books would say, the proper book to read -- i would tell students, not in that tone of voice, but read this. go read that. that doesn't work with any but a sliver now. they're only used to reading articles and bits of things. that's how they get their information. many would rather get it through the ear. they want to watch somebody talk about it. there's so much on line now of people talking knowledge. a lot of them have grown up on that. so yes, i feel, i worry that the book is becoming obsolete. except to a set of people who embrace them, i think. i think rose compared it to l.p.'s. joshua: it was a great comparison. she says, we know, she quotes some young person or an aggregate of young people as saying, we know there are people out there who listen to vinyl and that's cool. but that's a really weird

subset. that's what it is to read a book. john: i wouldn't be surprised. everything is going to get shorter. devil's advocate, maybe books have always been too listening and it's been an artificial thing, how much do you remember of any one book. but i'm bending over way backwards because just to come here, the new reagan biography, which i highly recommend and i didn't write it, reagan biography is like potato chips, i cannot put it down. even though i thought i knew enough about that man. it's heavy. it weighs as much as four shoes. i dragged it down here because i want that. i get the feeling that now makes me old. joshua: but you just recommended it to me. excellent. john: potato chips. you won't be able to put it down. joshua: you mentioned 2013, maybe i'll close with this and hand things over to the audience.

2013, is there a linguistic -- linguistically oriented book to be written as a complement to the sorts of thing he was talking about? that is to say there's all this discussion about how iphones and so on may or may not, in his view, i would say more may, be the cause of attention deficit, blah, blah, blah. what about language? is it really true that there was some kind dropoff or conceivably some kind of linguistic dropoff just then too? and for the same cause? i don't want to put words in your mouth, you didn't quite say that but you were edging toward it. john: that's a book someone, not me, is going to have to write someday. whether those phones change language in a significant way. getting beyond the now shopworn topic is texting language, etc. we have enough books and arls

written about that. but yes, it'll be interesting to see. you have to wait until things have happened. for example, somebody in the atlantic wrote a piece during the lockdown predicting that because children were going to be home with their parents and grandparents who had been born in other places that children were going to learn their home language better than they had learned it before. that turned out to not be true at all. the person who wrote that article was me. so you have to wait and see the results of things. but clearly that piece needs to be written with a language-linguistics focus. we'll see in 10 years. joshua: ok. we have 20 or so minutes. let me hand it over to all of you. again, if you have a question and you're watching live and you're not in this room right now, nate.moore@aei.org. somebody will come by with a

mike. >> hi, first, thank you so much for speaking with us. i was reading burke's reflection os on the revolution in france relatively recently. one of his complaints about that event is that chivalry was being let go of. one could imagine making a similar statement about the rituals related to chivalry as you did about the me and i kind of distinction. that even though it might have been something that someone just made up, it continues with real, moral value and something identifying about the civilization that practiced those rituals is that an argument you find sympathetic by those who would defend the me and i distinction or the they distinction? or is that something you think doesn't make sense in this context? john: um, i always say i don't

say um, and i just said it. i think the me and the i think, and i know how weird this seems. in my next book i lay it out very carefully but unless you have all of that it seems like i'm just being a gadfly. i find it utterly useless and of course i'm wearing socks, i'm using deodorant, all it is is a fashion. that's all it is. but there's a larger point which is that there are many ways of being chivalrous in language a lot of the ones that we have in english are just hidden. so the waiter or waitress comes and says, what are we having today? notice that what are you having, little direct. but the waiter is not going to have any food with you. the we is a form of politeness. or if somebody says to a single person, and this happens in the south, y'all come back, you

here, often that -- you hear, often that is said to one person. but that's not calling one person y'all like in a bugs bunny cartoon. it's leaving the implication that there might be somebody else out in the car. it's too direct to just say you come back. so y'all is like usted in spanish, you never think of it, but no, y'all is very polite. like is very polite. people now on npr say sort of every 10 seconds. people say sort of whenever they are about to say something when it's said without an um or a like or a sort of would be pushy or dramatic. they're being nice. i'm more interested in those chivalrous sort of things than billy and i went to the store but i take your point. joshua: did you use a microaggression there with waiter and waitress.