During the small hours of this morning, Saddam Hussein was captured in his hiding hole (we have so far heard it referred to a spider hole, a squirrel hole, and a rat hole, by the way: the media have yet to standardize on a specific vermin metaphor). Ambassador Bremer decided on resolutely informal style for the opening of his speech announcing the event: his first paragraph was, in full, "We got 'im!" He gave it that American English flapping and voicing of [t] between vowels that makes "got 'im" sound like what could be written phonetically as ['gadm]. But within minutes the BBC were reporting what he had said as "We got him", in their educated southern British dialect and rather formal style, with the "t" of got sounding like [t], and the [h] of him clearly audible. There is a real question about whether this (largely involuntary) style and dialect switch reported the content of Bremmer's utterance correctly. Beside the phonetic point, there is a syntactic and semantic one: "We got 'im" in American English can be present tense -- the equivalent in British of "We have got him." But in British English, "We got him" can only be preterite tense, the equivalent of "We did get him."
�Geoff Pullum/Language Log Dec.14.03
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Ω{Probably at the apocalypse moment, or the lead up, you know, when the edges of the dream world start to curl back from the heat, like now, only later, when it's pretty obviously coming down, but while there's still radio and TV, while the 'net's still working, all that infrastructure shaking but intact, I'd be checking voices like Pullum's; the steady insistence on reason as more than an option, wit born of a glimpsed and still possible future composed of detailed accuracy and kept faith. The apposite delight of complex semiotic tinkering, even at that late date.}
