Book ‘im, Ling-O!

One of my colleagues at the university where I work, an expert in criminal justice, has seen signs of the "CSI effect."  Students who are fans of CSI -- or Forensic Files or some other similar show -- have been gravitating toward careers in forensic science.

These shows didn't even exist back when I was growing up -- unless you include Hawaii Five-O (the original Hawaii Five-O), where no one was taking DNA samples.  Nevertheless, Steve McGarrett still had a chance to say, at the end of episode after episode, "Book 'im, Danno.").

Alas, these shows do not seem to be driving young gumshoe wannabes to the field where the real action is: forensic linguistics.

Don't tell me you didn't see that one coming.  I'm a language lover, after all, and I happen to know that an individual's use of language, or idiolect, can be a kind of personal signature --not as distinctive as DNA, but still sufficiently distinctive to help identify someone.  That's because we tend to gravitate, often unconsciously, to the same words, syntactic structures, and punctuation.  Language must be mutually intelligible and thus be formed around consistent patterns of syntax, etc.  Otherwise, we could not understand one another.  Still, there is something lovely, deeply human about individual variations in expression.  Each of us is special, and so is our language.

In fact, the inspiration for this column came from my own idiolect.  I was asking my media manager, Jupiter, for some changes in spaces around dashes -- no, really I was -- and I kidded that Jupiter probably wished I wasn't so madly in love with dashes.

I am, though.  (Oh my gosh, I just noticed that I used two dashes in the same sentence where I was writing about how much I love dashes.  That was not intentional, but it is revealing.)  I don't know when this love affair began, but I'm pretty sure that I didn't enter it intentionally.  I didn't log onto PunctuationMatch.com, pass on the semicolons and parentheses and then linger over a lovely dash.  (By the way, I should pause here to disappoint my fellow language lovers and point out that there is no PunctuationMatch.com, although AI apparently thinks there is, since it promptly turns that imaginary URL into a link every time I type it.  Maybe AI is really, really hoping for someone who will make her feel complete.  Well, I do know some single quotation marks.)

The delightful dash is a subject for a future column.  In fact, I could do a whole series on punctuation.  I like colons, too, but I worry that they lord it over the poor semicolons, who probably never feel they are all they could be.

Let's get back to forensic linguistics.  There really is such a thing.  I actually have met a linguist who served as an expert for trials, and a mentor of mine put me in touch with another (because she thinks I should hang out a shingle).  If you take a guilty pleasure in Forensic Files (as I confess to do), you may recall the occasional forensic linguist on that program.

Forensic linguistics briefly went mainstream back in the '90s after an anonymous author came out with a novel called Primary Colors, leaving some people wondering who was behind the book.  (You may be more familiar with the film version, in which John Travolta plays a politician who looks a bit -- and sounds a lot -- like Bill Clinton.)  A linguist named Donald Foster studied the language of the novel and correctly identified the author as Newsweek columnist Joe Klein.

Now, I read an article that Foster wrote about his investigation, and I should point out that Klein's style is very distinctive, so much so that it probably didn't require someone of Foster's ability to crack this case.  For example, Foster observed that both Primary Colors and Klein's writing elsewhere show a fair number of adjectives formed with the affixes -y.  Klein didn't invent these affixes, of course, but most of us rarely if ever use words such as cartoony, cottony, fluttery,  slouchy, radicalish, smallish, and warmish.  In fact, I have written a few books and more essays than I can count -- tens of thousands of pages, probably -- and I'm pretty sure I have not used any of those words and have rarely attached -y to any noun to form an uncommon word such as fluttery.  Like most people, I use it in fairly common words such as sunny and curly, but seldom anywhere else.  Foster also found some syntac-tics, as well: a couple of soft spots, for example, for sentence fragments and "short sentences beginning 'And then' or 'And so.'"  For me, Klein's most revealing shibboleth (an identifying linguistic feature) is his penchant for compounding.  English has a very long history of mashing words together, as does German, from which it emerged in the fifth century, but Klein seems to have what I will call a this-is-so-much-fun-OMG-I-can't-stop-doing-this obsession with compounding.  Foster writes that "Klein likes to create such verbal constructions as 'triple-back-over-somersault-and-pander-pirouette' and 'Scare-Seniors-to-Death strategy'; so, too, does Anonymous, who often links as many as twelve or fourteen words into one long compound."

None of this linguistic evidence is as conclusive as DNA, but Klein, by allowing these predilections to pervade his prose, made it pretty easy on us.  (By the way, he at first denied that he had written the book, but later confirmed that he did.). In other cases, I think, it would be much, much more difficult to pin an article, short story, novel, or poem on a particular writer, although some writers do indeed leave clues in the form of favorite words, grammatical constructions, and punctuation marks -- this author not excepted.  In a future column, I will share some distinctive features of a few notable writers, such as Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman.

I am not a forensic linguist, and I don't think I will ever be, but maybe someday I'll write a novel about one.  I already have my catch phrase: "Book 'im, Ling-O!"