I Think Therefore IB

Some of you are struggling to come up with presentation topics, yet issues worthy of ToK happen every day. One recent example is Barack Obama’s swearing-in last week, which probably raised multiple issues we could talk about. However, since we are currently studying language, I thought we should focus on linguistic KI’s.

We could commence with the swearing-in itself, the different names Obama was referred to with (”Barack Obama”, “Barack Hussein Obama”, “President Obama”), all of which carry more meaning than ‘the first black US president’ (yes, and the different words used for Obama’s racial classification are yet another language issue).

We’ve also got Obama’s inauguration speech (Jan 20, 2009), which you should read, and should mark words or phrases that you are think would be interesting to talk about.

Some analyses of the speech are available on the internet, including:

An Analysis of the Prose Style in Obama’s Inauguration Speech – by Stanley Fish, who is a professor of law. Why would a law professor analyse a text like this? It might be surprising, but really is not. In fact, it reminds me of an assertion I read in a book over the winter holidays (”Performing without a Stage: The Art of Literary Translation”), in which the author, Robert Wechsler, argues that “there is no better way to prepare to become a literary translator than to go to law school and practice law” (14). The explanation Wechsler provides is convincing enough for me, though those future-lawyers among you who don’t enjoy analysing literature and thought you were wasting your time, might not have considered this yet:

[B]eing a laywer requires [...] appreciating the value of words not just as little wads of meaning or feeling, but as missiles that can have huge ramifications if you can’t tell the difference betwen short-range and long-range, between nuclear and chemical warheads. For lawyers, multimillion-dollar deals can succeed or fail (for one side or the other) based on the level of ambiguity or precision of a certain word or phrase, in a certain context, for a certain purpose. Every word a lawyer uses is a commitmet, witha goal, an interest, and a risk that is – or at least should be – understood. Therefore, the lawyer is concerned with the finest distinctions between words, not only in meaning but also in tone and level of clarity. (14)

 
Do read people’s comments on the speech as well as on Prof. Fish’s analysis. Quite some individuals discuss single words and what they mean to them, something that allows us to realise that what we do in class is something that concerns people in real life.

More insightful comments:

Slate’s Annotations of the Inaugural Speech

And another link:

The Language of Inaugural Addresses – kind of neat… you can click on the heads of former presidents and see the most common words in their inauguration speeches. I feel like they read like some sort of abstract poem of a specific moment in time…..

And, to conclude, a new word I learned this week: POTUS (= President of the United States).