The Korean(-American) passive "himself"?

[Joel S. Berson]

Other media have not hesitated to say Cho killed 32 people, including
the NYTimes in other reporters' articles.  For example:

"He has made the world weep," said the statement, released by
Sun-Kyung Cho, the sister of Seung-Hui Cho, the 23-year-old Virginia
Tech senior who methodically killed dozens of students and faculty
members on Monday. "We are living in a nightmare."  [today;
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/21/us/21virginia.html?_r=1&oref=slogin]

And an AP dispatch published in the Times:

Seung-Hui Cho, 23, killed 32 people Monday on the Virginia Tech
campus before taking his own life.  [today;
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-On-the-2008-Trail.html]

Earlier:

On Monday, the student, Cho Seung-Hui, made a horrible kind of
history by using that gun and another pistol to go on a murderous
rampage at the university, in Blacksburg, Va., before taking his own
life.  [April 18; http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/us/18pistols.html]

The usual form in the U.S. when one is legally nervous would be to
say "alleged":  "in which he is alleged to have killed 32 victims and
then himself on the Virginia Tech campus ..."

Joel

At 4/21/2007 01:08 AM, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>I think the overriding concern here is the right to be presumed innocent
>until found guilty in court in the US. If the reporter said that Cho did
>it, then there might even be a case of libel or bad reporting at the least.
>
>Benjamin Barrett
>a cyberbreath for language life
>livinglanguages.wordpress.com
>
>Joel S. Berson wrote:
>>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>-----------------------
>>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
>>Subject:      Re: The Korean(-American) passive "himself"?
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>At 4/20/2007 09:49 AM, Laurence Horn wrote [comments interspersed]:
>>
>>>At 9:26 AM -0400 4/20/07, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>>>
>>> From The New York Times, Wed. April 18, New England Final, 1/3, by
>>>
>>>>Manny Fernandez and Marc Santora:
>>>>
>>>>"Mr. Cho's eruption of violence, in which 32 victims and himself were
>>>>killed on the Virginia Tech campus here in a rampage of gunfire, was
>>>>never directly signaled by his actions or words ... ".
>>>>
>>>>This construction is certainly awkward.  Was Cho killed by someone
>>>>else, such as a police officer?  Were the other 32 killed by someone
>>>>else?  Aha, the passive, which lets the columnists avoid assigning
>>>>responsibility for the killings.
>>>>
>>>>The responsibility for the "himself" must rest with the authors, so
>>>>perhaps it has become Hispanic-American.
>>>>
>>>>(There is an obvious alternative, which I know I saw and probably in
>>>>the very same newspaper:  "in which he killed 32 victims and then
>>>>himself on the Virginia Tech campus ...".)
>>>Nothing particularly Korean or Spanish about the use of the passive
>>>construction here.
>>
>>It was, of course, not the passive but the "himself" that I was,
>>perhaps humorlessly, suggesting was now extended from the
>>stereotypically Irish and being either applied to Koreans or used
>>by Hispanics.
>>
>>
>>>One motivation for using the passive rather than
>>>the active alternative you propose might have been to present the
>>>victims as topic of the sentence while demoting the salience of the
>>>agent--the sentence as published, awkward as it may be, is about the
>>>victims and his effect on them, while your alternative is more
>>>centrally about Cho and his action.
>>
>>I don't think a sentence that begins "Mr. Cho's eruption of violence"
>>and that after the non-essential (? "relative") clause "in which ..."
>>continues "was never directly signaled by his actions or words" is
>>about the victims.
>>
>>
>>>More prescriptively correct
>>>would have been "...in which 32 victims and he were killed...", but
>>>that has its own awkwardness.  News reports and official
>>>pronouncements are certainly fond of the deferred-responsibility
>>>passive ("Mistakes were made"), but given the context, the parallel
>>>isn't exact.
>>
>>True.  It was not the speaker but the reporter who was avoiding
>>assigning responsibility.
>>
>>Joel

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