How Caroline Flint gave the game away about expecting a post in the cabinet

It’s hardly surprising that people believe that Caroline Flint was expecting a seat in the cabinet when she expressed loyalty to Gordon Brown the day before she resigned.  

Have a look at the interview below, where, after a minute or two, you can hear her saying: “.. and serving, if he wants me to, in Gordon Brown’s c-uhh-government.”  

Given the context of the discussion, it's difficult to think of any word beginning with a ‘c’ or a ‘k’ other than ‘cabinet’ that she so quickly aborted and corrected to "government".

The trouble with slips like this is that, as the late Harvey Sacks, one of the founders of conversation analysis, used to say “Once it’s out, it’s anyone’s.” 

The interview is interesting in other ways too, as it includes quite a lot of breaches of one of the most basic conversational rules of all, namely 'one speaker speaks at a time' (for more on which, see HERE). 

You can also see an interesting first hand report on the interview HERE from Iain Dale, one of the interviewees.

Pre-delicate hitches from the White House

The delicate nature of some recent news stories seems to have produced a deluge of ‘pre-delicate hitches’ (for more on which, see HERE).

Hillary Clinton was at it in response to the nuclear news from North Korea last week, as was Gordon Brown on Sunday when challenged about the Queen not being invited to the forthcoming 65th anniversary commemorations of D-Day.

So too, on the same delicate subject, was this White House spokesman who managed to produce an ‘uh’ at a rate of once every 3.5 words:

Journalist: Since Queen Elizabeth is the only living head of state who served in the armed forces during World War II, President Obama believes that she should surely be officially invited, doesn't he?

Spokesman: He does and uh uh we uh u are working with those involved uh uh to see if uh we could make that happen. Obviously –

Journalist: Wonderful!

'Pre-delicate hitches' from Brown as he avoids answering a question about the Queen

I’ve already posted some observations about ‘pre-delicate hitches’ coming out of the mouths of Gordon Brown and Hillary Clinton.

The general point is that such ‘hitches’ (e.g. ums, ers, pauses, restarted words, etc.) tend to happen when a speaker is about to say something that he or she knows is likely to come across as ‘delicate’ to their listeners.

And they came thick and fast on Sunday morning as Mr Brown tried to deal with Andrew Marr’s challenging question about why the Queen hadn’t been invited to attend the D-Day commemorations in Normandy.

Needless to say, he didn’t make any attempt to answer the question, but the number and frequency of 'hitches' suggest that he might actually have been finding his own evasiveness more uncomfortable than he usually does.

MARR: It’s a disgrace, is it not, that the Queen is not going to be representing us at D-Day at those commemoration services in France. How did that come about?

BROWN: I-I think-uh-eh you have to uh-ask-uh th-the palace to get their statements uh-u- on this.

Uh I have simply done what is my duty as a – as a Prime Minister – I’ve-uh accepted the u-personal invitation of Mr- Mr Sarkozy.

I think you know that Mr Harper, the Canadian prime minister, i- is going, and I think in these circumstances, this particular event uh-was-uh this one of the events was –was –was one that the president wanted to be for prime ministers and presidents, but if the Queen wanted to attend these- these- these events, or if any member of the Royal family wanted to attend these events, I would make that possible."

Planning to say 'um' and 'uh'

For non-native speakers of English, learning how to use our definite article must be an absolute doddle compared with the problems I’ve always had in handling ‘le’, ‘la’ and ‘les in French and the even more complicated ‘der’, ‘die’, ‘das’, ‘die’, etc. in German (for which I achieved my worst failure ever with a pitiful 7% at 'O' level).

English nouns don’t have genders so ‘the’ works fine for all of them – except, of course, when we’re speaking. Nouns beginning with a consonant are indeed preceded by ‘the’, but, if the noun starts with a vowel, ‘the’ is pronounced ‘thee’ – so we say ‘the pub’ but ‘thee egg’.

Interestingly, the definite article often comes before ‘uhs’ and ‘ums’ when we're speaking. Even more interesting is the fact that, when it does, speakers invariably use the ‘thee’ form: ‘thee-uh’. The fact that the ‘the’ is fitted to an upcoming vowel sound presumably means that we know that an ‘uh’ or an ‘um’ is on its way before we select ‘thee’ rather than ‘the’.

On the evidence of Mrs Clinton's recent ‘consequences’ statement, she does it quite a lot as you can see from the following video clips:

1. "It has chosen to violate thee u-specific language of thee uh UN Security Council Resolution 1718."

2. ".. discussions are going on to uh add to thee uh consequences"

3. "I want to underscore thee uh commitments that the United States has"



The interesting question for people who know more than I do about languages other than English is whether they too involve planned 'ums' and 'uhs' - and, if so, what form does it take?

For example, do German speakers project an upcoming masculine, feminine or neutral noun with 'der uh', 'die uh' or 'das uh'? And what happens in languages that don't have definite articles at all?

The ‘delicacy’ of Mrs Clinton’s ‘consequences’ for North Korea

First of all, thanks to those of you who took the trouble to make comments about Mrs Clinton’s ‘Consequences’ statement (posted yesterday) – not only because I found them interesting and agree with much of what you said, but also because it was a relief to discover that I wasn’t alone in thinking that there was something rather odd about it.

Some of you may have seen something I posted about the concept of ‘pre-delicate hitches’ a while back, where the general argument is that such hitches (e.g. ums, ers, pauses, etc.) occur when a speaker is about to say something that he or she knows is likely to come across as ‘delicate’ to their listeners.

On watching this sequence again, I realised that it was the first two paragraphs (reproduced and re-transcribed below) that were what had really caught my attention in the first place. In the course of 120 words, there are more than 40 such hitches (i.e. one every three words), not to mention the abstract vagueness of some of the language (‘violate the specific language’, ‘abrogated the obligations it entered into’, ‘consequences’, ‘behaviour’, ‘framework’, etc.).

The 'uhs' and frequency and duration of pauses bring down the speed of her delivery to about 92 words per minute (i.e. words other than 'uh' or 'um'), which is extremely slow compared with the ‘ideal’ speed for public speakers of somewhere between 120-140 words per minute (which is also much slower than normal conversational speeds of around 180 words per minute).

Interestingly, the number of 'hitches' diminishes once she moves on to the second part of the statement, which was delivered at the much more satisfactory rate of 130 words per minute.

Two factors may have influenced this. One was that the hitches came at their thickest and fastest when the key audience most likely to find what she was saying particularly ‘delicate’ was the North Koreans themselves.

The other was that, to be fair to Mrs Clinton, this was not a pre-prepared speech but came in answer to a question at a press conference taking place in Egypt, very soon after the news from North Korea had come through. So it’s possible that there hadn’t been enough time for her to get a full briefing from State Department specialists, which meant that she had no choice but to make it up as she went along (i.e. ‘busk’ it).

(N.B. This revised transcript uses a convention that’s also useful for marking up scripts of speeches before delivery that's described in Lend Me Your Ears, pp. 299-301, where a single slash indicates a slight pause of a fifth to half a second and a double slash indicates a longer pause of half a second to a second).

MRS CLINTON:
North Korea has made // uhh //a choice. // It has chosen to // violate the // u-specific language / of the / uh // UN Security Council Resolution 1718. // It has ignored the international community. // It has abrogated the obligations it entered into / through the Six-Party Talks. // And it uh continues to act in a provocative and belligerent manner / uh toward its neighbors.// There are consequences to such actions.//

In the United Nations uh as we speak / discussions are going on to // uh // add to the / uh / consequences that North Korea / will face // u-coming out of the latest uh // u-behavior / u-with the // uh / intent to // u-try to rein in / uh the North Koreans // uh and get them back into a framework where they are once again // uh fulfilling their obligations and moving toward denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.



For her more fluent continuation and the rest of the statement, see video and transcript on yesterdays posting.

P.S. And, thanks to a link from Charles Crawford, see HERE for a fascinating article on the Clintons' problems since Obama took over.

Gordon Brown is finding the Jacqui Smith expenses story more ‘delicate’ than he says

Long ago, I heard one of the founders of conversation analysis (and I can’t remember whether it was Emanuel Schegloff or Gail Jefferson) talking about ‘pre-delicate hitches’ – a rather cumbersome piece of jargon for referring to a fairly common occurrence in conversation.

‘Hitches’ are things like ‘uh-’ and ‘um-, restarts of a word, or slight pauses, and the observation was that these are regularly found at those points in a conversation where the speaker is leading towards a word or a topic that they know is rather ‘delicate’ (e.g. a swear word, obscenity or potentially controversial news, gossip, etc.).

The general argument was that such ‘hitches’ are used to give advance notice that we’re about to say something that we know is rather ‘delicate’ – and know that others might find ‘delicate’ too.

I was therefore fascinated to notice that there were at least ten ‘pre-delicate hitches’ in the first four sentences of Gordon Brown’s comments about the scandal of the Home Secretary’s expenses claim for a blue movie watched by her husband – which you can check out by following the transcript below (hitches in bold) while watching the video HERE.

(P.S. Since posting this, I've realised that you can't actually read the transcript at the same time as watching the video, so keen anoraks will have to copy it on to another file and/or print it out).

BROWN:

"This is- this is very much a-a personal matter (pause) uh- for- for Jacqui.
"She’s made her uh- apology.
"Her husband has made it uh- clear that he is- he is apologised `(sic).
"Uh I-I think that the best thing is that Jacqui Smith gets- gets on with her work as- which is what she wants to do."

What these hitches suggest is that Mr Brown is finding the whole episode much more delicate than he’s letting on in the words that he actually uses.

(If you found this of any interest, you might also like to inspect my explanation of his claim to 'have saved the world' gaffe in December).