David's World

November 17, 2005

The, uh, speech, the President's, I mean, the US-President's speech

Linguist Mark Liberman has an interesting - and amusing - analysis of hesitations in George Bush's speech. The bottom-line is: the President is speaking more slowly. And from the quotations and audio clip in the article I gather that his words don't make any more sense:

Obviously, the extent to which uh [0.295] the Japanese government wants to give reconstruction money to Iraq is up to the Japanese government, and [pause 0.187]
to- to the- and I- as to the- [pause 0.205] the- the uh deployment of troops, it's up to- [0.421] it's up to the government. [pause 1.237] 's what happens in democracies -- government makes decisions that uh [pause 0.598] that uh that they're uh capable of living with, and that's [pause 1.966] that's what we said, ((we)) said, do the best you can do; [pause 0.530] make up your own mind, it's your decision, not mine.

Oh well. Google knows what to reply when you're looking for examples of failure.