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Obama may or may not be an egotist, but he certainly is a Sophist: half-assed misleading statements come out of this guy with just about the same frequency as from Reagan, Bush1, Clinton, Bush 2….Better evidence for egotism is his signing the new defense act that gives him the power to assassinate, something new in America–he could have resisted that, no?

Bravo for the fact checkers! — who are also reality checkers, bringing us back down to earth. Analysis or claims that are not built on a firm foundation of supportable evidence reeks of mendacity and malice at worst,  irresponsibility at best. For many of us, media representation is not only visual and auditory via print and TV, but also olfactory (although the mass dulling of this vital sense in an election year is phenomenal). I also appreciate the citation of sources in the piece that provide grounds for the claims and multiple perspectives on the points raised — practicing, not just preaching. Ah, Balance, be it in facts and analysis (political discourse), or received teachings and actual usage (split infinitives).

You seem to have gone from 0-60 in less than 5 seconds here. “Lying” is a bit over the top.

Where’s your evidence for deliberate deceitfulness — in both instances that you cite?

Given George Will’s political agenda, I think it’s safe to say that his statement was NOT hyperbole. He either failed to check his facts, or his statements have been deliberately deceitful.

And I respectfully disagree with you about this entry. I think that exposing lies/hyperbole/errors for what they are is always important.

Curious — I rarely agree with George Will, but I had the same impression that Obama used “I” instead of “we” more often than other presidents — or other leaders. This was based on hearing random sound bites on the news, rather than going over the full text of his speeches. It was, as I say, an impression. I don’t think I was lying when I mentioned it to my wife. Maybe George Will should be held to a higher standard, but I still think calling him a liar is unjustified. My impression is that he’s more of a pompous conservative know-it -all.

A well substantiated argument.  Warms the cockles of my heart. :)

“Sophist: half-assed misleading statements”….that is called conventional political rhetoric in other circles. 

This has been going on since early June 2009! As a commenter on LLog’s latest entry said: “Language Log gets a lot of citations these days, and it’s SEO ranking is quite amazing. I doubt that George Will himself has read any of Mark’s posts on this topic, but it seems likely that one of his interns (or whoever does his grunt work) HAS run across it and maybe even brought it to his attention. This is an OLD topic.Bottom line. I think Mark is probably spot on when he calls Will a liar. He really knows better and says this crap anyway.”

In a recent essay distributed to newspapers, George Will extrapolated an opinion in an article in a scholarly publication – in which the authors stated that killing a new-born infant is just as innocuous as aborting a fetus, because neither is a complete human being – to the entire group of people who are ‘pro-abortion’, that is, supportive of the right to abortion as legally defined in Roe v Wade. Will thus characterized the entire pro-choice plurality of Americans by one obscure statement by a couple of perhaps politically naive and humanly insensitive academicians, as if their statement – in effect, that there is nothing wrong with infanticide - revealed the actual belief of millions in that plurality. This was, on Will’s part, either an egregious error in logic or outright dishonesty in pursuasive reasoning.

I’ve heard of that research, but haven’t read it, so this is a response just based on the NRP report. I don’t find the email exchange very convincing evidence for the idea that a person with lower status uses “I” more often than a person with higher status. The problem is that in each instance, the person with supposedly lower status 1) initiates an exchange and 2) makes a request. Given there are three different factors involved (status, initiation of communicative exchange, request), it is different to single out one as the decisive factor. Maybe people initiating communicative exchanges use “I” more often than people responding to them (make sense, as you have to explain why you are contacting the person in the first place). Or maybe people making requests use “I” more often than people responding to them (again, makes sense, as you may have to explain why you are making a request from them). Or maybe low status speakers use “I” more frequently.

As I said, I haven’t read the actual study, so he may have other evidence to support the claim, but the letters on NPR aren’t really conclusive. 

I confess to being a bit confused.  Apparently George Will has stated that President Obama uses the word “I” with remarkably high frequency in public statements.  

Did he continue that pattern of commentary after evidence to the contrary appeared?  Was the baseline other Presidents (apparently) or the general population?  (BTW, how does the current President look relative to the general population?)

But assuming that Will was wrong, did he continue that Presidential egomania theme?  There’s no indication whatsoever about that in Professor Pullum’s essay.   This isn’t trivial.  If George Will made his I-statements once, he might have been mistaken.  If he continued the commentary when his contention had been publicly disproven, that’s another matter.  If he continued the commentary after knowing his contention was wrong, there’s some reason to believe he was lying (or unaware of his surroundings). 

My point here is that the posting does nothing to inform us of the pattern of George Will’s behavior.
I don’t know, and am not better informed by the posting.  In any case, it’s generally not right to assume malicious intent without considering error, ignorance, or incompetence.

Therefore, I also confess to being massively unimpressed.  Prof. Pullum apparently makes the same subjective leaps (without bothering to present supporting facts) of the sort he finds so distasteful in George Will. 

I have a mom with advanced Alzheimer’s disease, and while I love her totally, I don’t really pay attention to the nonsense sentences she says these days, so  I’m astonished to discover that otherwise sensible people apparently read George Will’s columns.

One should not miss Karl Rove’s comments about creating reality, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community .

Yes, taking a page from the Democrat (Alinksy) playbook.  Dems have been doing this for decades.

Which prompts me to conclude that those who agree with Fish and Wills are humorless prigs. 

No giant head (and emwhitphd), what I am pointing out is that this has been standard operating procedure for decades for dems.  Now that a republican has used the tactic, it is being decried.  Didn’t say I agreed with it, just pointing out the obvious.

Can one know from use of language if another person is lying or just careless? I think both cases are instances of the latter. In neither do I see much evidence for the former. Still I would not want to accuse the writer of the column of lying about language. Merely suggest that alternatives exist: Infinitive splitting seems too minor a concern to warrant putting a ton of research into it. Accusing Obama of egotism may be too serious a matter to base on a statement that can so easily be proven wrong. In either case people who really care about the issue will check the facts and not believe something based on a statement without reference to any data…

 Those of us who have worked in public secondary schools know that students are no longer reliably taught parts-of-speech, how to diagram a sentence or how to write in cursive.  There is nothing that a computer can do to prevent a two headed boy with a fascination by mummers from losing one of his heads and growing up to be a professor mathematics of.

Let’s just call it what it really is: a lie.

I suspect Will was merely lazy, not lying.  There have been occasions when Obama has used “I” when “we” would have been more appropriate, and it fits the narrative that Obama is a narcissist — a narrative Obama has done nothing to dispel (see the recent fun over Obama’s insertion into the biographies of former presidents).  

People like narratives, and they will believe anything that fits the narrative even if it turns out not to be true (e.g., Sarah Palin never said she could see Russia her house (that was Tina Fey), but that fits the narrative of her being a lackwit, and so any number of people (even academics who should know better) repeat the falsehood). 

Just as the canard about Al Gore claiming to have invented the internet has been repeated ever since he didn’t say it.

A pathological narcissist is one who believes his own lies. Need we say more?

Might I suggest a new word for you? -”accuracy”. The word liar doesn’t appear at all in the piece, so to accuse the writer of “repeatedly calling [people] liars” is untrue, a lie, or, if you prefer, a mistake. If the writer calls no one a liar, it is also hard to see how you are not mistaken in assuming his calling people liars (repeatedly) is evidence of “a seething anger”.

What is true is that Prof. Pullum characterises the telling of a demonstrable untruth as lying. One could argue that one man’s lie is another’s mistake. For me the blatant disregard for easilly checkable evidence moves it out of the mistake category.

I would think that a lie has to be deliberate.  Perhaps George Will’s claim was simply a mistake.  He should have researched the subject more thoroughly.  Nevertheless, I suspect that most U. S. Presidents are egoists.  I don’t absolutely know that, however, but I’m not lying.  It’s simply my opinion.

“Americans, from the point of view other nationalities, are notoriously insensitive to irony”

I think this means, people in other countries believe that Americans are insensitive to irony.
It’s just a national stereotype, I suppose; but there is no evidence for it at all.