Heavens to Betsy, those young people are strange!

Crack sociolinguists at the Associated Press have detected a change in John Kerry's use of generationally specific language. The article starts off like so:

"Heavens to Betsy," it's hard to believe that the John Kerry of U.S. Senate stiff-speak is out there on the campaign trail tossing off homespun phrases, and even a joke or two.

SC was immediately reminded of John McWhorter's excellent Language Log post, "When's the Last Time You Heard an Old Person Say 'Dadburn It'?".

A quick Google search indicates 11,400 hits for "Heavens to Betsy".

In contrast, the article demonstrates Kerry's supposed attempts to appeal to young people by saying "blah blah blah", characterized as "an idiom likely to be heard among teenagers in a shopping mall, but not on the Senate floor". They quote Kerry like so:

"You're going to hear all this talk, `Oh, we've turned the corner, we're doing better, blah, blah,'" he said, running on the phrase as his Wisconsin audience erupted in laughter. "You know, blah and blah and blah."

So SC also Googled "blah and blah and blah". Only 533 hits. Those young people must not know how to use the Interweb.

Of course, in the absence of any actual data on Sen. Kerry's speech habits over time, it's rather doubtful that this story started out as anything more than a bored reporter noticing him saying "Heavens to Betsy!" one morning. That particular phrase probably isn't something the Senator says very often, but it's hard to believe that he really speaks as though he's on the Senate floor no matter what the context is, as the article suggests at one point. Of course, judging by the list at the end of this article, it's also possible that the writer has no clue about actual Congressional decorum.

Comments

[Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey]

I think you're reaching here. Did the AP author actually mean to imply that Kerry had been heard to use the phrase, or was this simply journalistic shorthand for "archaic phraseology"? The AP writer could just as well have said "Dadburn it" or "Golly gee"

[Semantic Compositions]

The writer did include an actual quote of Kerry saying "Heavens to Betsy":

"Heavens to Betsy," he said earlier this month when remarking on Republicans' failure to reinstate the assault weapons ban. "You bet your boots I know what I'm talking about," Kerry said Monday when promising to be more fiscally responsible than Bush.

What I question is whether or not this has really been anything like a trend in his speech.

In general, I've been skeptical of reporting on "Kerryisms" or "Bushisms". Mark Liberman has made, in my mind at least, the definitive point on writing about alleged verbal tics of politicians. He was talking about speech errors, but I think the same point applies to statistical claims about language use. Show me a corpus full of Kerry's speech that demonstrates an increase in his daily use of archaic expressions, and then I'll believe that this is something conscious and not just a reporter picking at a few offhand comments.