Noncompositional

I’m no expert on forensic linguistics, but I think I’ll go ahead and comment on a recent case that has some relevence to language use.

The case involves Liz Seccuro, who says she was raped 21 years ago by then-college classmate William Beebe during a UVA fraternity party. At the time she communicated the crime to campus authorities (who had jurisdiction), but after Beebe dropped out she dropped the matter (or, depending on which source you listen to, the university dropped the ball by not notifying the police, or by being lax on rape cases).

Then, just last September, she received a snail-mail letter from Beebe apologizing for what he had done. This started a communication between them, via e-mail, in which Beebe admits to and apologizes for the crime. The letters later contributed to his arrest, as Virginia does not place a statute of limitations on felony charges, including rape.

When I was listening to the story on CNN, I thought, man, this is an open-and-shut case, especially considering some of the statements that Beebe makes in the e-mail. For instance,

Dear Liz, I want to make clear that I’m not intentionally minimizing the fact of having raped you. I did.

Yeah, pretty clear. But there is some complication, namely that the first person to use the word rape was Seccuro, not Beebe. From the Dateline NBC interview:

Magnus (interviewer): He doesn’t use the word rape initially. Seccuro: No. “Harmed [as in In October 1984, I harmed you].” “The incident.” “What I did to you.” Magnus: You wanted him to use it though, right? Seccuro: Yeah. I mean, why half apologize? Own up to what you did. Use the word.

She later sent a message explicitly calling him on his circumlocutions, using the word rape. He then responded with the passage quoted above. Now, if I understand Beebe’s lawyer’s arguments correctly (they were presented on CNN’s Anderson 360, and the information doesn’t seem to be online yet [edit: now it is: a transcript of the show]), the fact that Seccuro used the word first means that his client didn’t confess to the crime. In fact, Beebe is claiming that he is innocent, and that he “treated her thoughtlessly in a college sex encounter,” which is explicitly not rape. First, notice the attempt to frame the incident as a college sex encounter, which “logically” includes rape, but which actually calls to mind the sort of thoughtless things that many college students engage in: something to be frowned upon as adults with hindsight perhaps, but to be expected (perhaps a sort of “boys will be boys” argument).

But how will Beebe’s lawyer get around the fact that his client definitely used the word rape? His argument is that as he was apologizing to Seccuro (as step 9 of Alcoholics Anonymous’s 12-step program), he didn’t want to contest her use of the word. It was a way of “being polite,” (if I recall the lawyer’s words correctly) and moving on to the rest of the apologizing and such. Interesting.

Now, it’s certainly true that when one doesn’t want to argue the appropriateness of a given word in some conversation, then it’s reasonable (sometimes) to skip over that fact and just use the other person’s word. For instance, if I am talking about the field of linguistics with someone who thinks that liberal arts and social sciences are forms of, say, “intellectual masturbation,” I might object. If this person acquiesces and goes on to talk about “self-contained disciplines,” then even though I might not agree with that either, I might go along, since it’s better than the initial formulation. Of course, I might also just go along with the masturbation, depending on how much it’s relevant to the content of the rest of the conversation. However, there are certainly cues I can use in oral conversation to indicate that I’m treating that word specially. I can give it what you might call “scare-quote intonation” (a slight pause before and after, with a sort of pitch that I’m not sure how to characterise), or actually perform air quotes, or roll my eyes every time, or whatever. None of this, except for the quotes, are really possible in written communication. Of course other methods are possible, such as using phrases such like as you say/call it or as it were, and so on. It seems unlikely that these would be present in the e-mails, as hedging generally makes for a pretty lame apology.

So say he was being polite. If he truly was “innocent,” then one might expect that he would have strongly objected to the term, which he does not seem to have done. And as rape is the central topic of the discussion between them, it would probably become increasingly uncomfortable to use a term you disagree with (as it did with Seccuro, though in the opposite manner: she was annoyed that he was not using the word). But without a full record of the mails, it’s hard to say anything conclusive. Nonetheless, I’d have to rate the lawyer’s quoted argument as “quite lame,” and point out that there is some (perhaps a lot of) other evidence involved, and I suppose that if what happened is determined (“objectively”) to be rape, and he admitted to having been the perpetrator of that incident, then there you have it.