Indistinguishable from Jesse

Steven Pinker, Listening Between the Lines:

In his grand jury testimony, Mr. Clinton expounded on the semantics of the present tense ("It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is") and of the words "alone," "cause" and, most notoriously, "sex."

Clinton's rebuttal to the Starr report:

Literally true statements cannot be the basis for a perjury prosecution, even if a witness intends to mislead the questioner. Likewise, answers to an inherently ambiguous question cannot constitute perjury.

A joke:

Have you ever touched Paula Jones or Monica Lewinsky?

It depends on your definition of "or".

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 25th, 2004 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Linguistics, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.