"Well, ultimately, I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry."
When I heard Dick Cheney's admission to Brit Hume on FOX News, my first thought was: "Why is Cheney snowcloning 'The House That Jack Built'?" The nursery rhyme is a classic example of recursively nested relative clauses — indeed, the whole purpose of the rhyme seems to be to teach children how clause-nesting works in English. (Such cumulative ditties pop up in other languages as well.) The structural similarity is obvious:
This is the cat (that killed the rat (that ate the malt (that lay in the house (that Jack built)))).
I
am
the guy (who pulled the trigger (that fired the round (that hit Harry))).
A quick blog search finds that I'm far from the only one who had this reaction:
His first and most important sentence should have been I shot Harry. Not, "I pulled the trigger, that shot the round...that milked the cow. That lay in the house that Jack Built."
(Body Language Lady)
All Cheney has admitted is the obvious: "I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry." And all in the house that Jack built.
(Adventus)
"I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry."
Wait I know this one... "that lives in the house that Jack built."
(cateriona)
"I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry..."
...who fell on the ground, that scared the quail, who flew through the air, that carried the rain, that fell on the roof, that covered the house that Jack built.
(SoLikeCandy)
"I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry."
...that milked the cow that pushed the plow that lived in the house that jack built.
(Shuff)
I see Der Sneer has finally fessed up: ""I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry (that tumbled the house that Jack built)."
(Fastlad)
"I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry,"...who sat in the house that Jack built.
(phantom_rose17)
Did Cheney have Mother Goose in mind when he concocted his quail-hunting confession? It's possible, though it would be an oddly playful allusion to make at such a serious moment. More likely he hit upon the clause-nesting formulation as a way to establish a clear chain of causality: from his hand to the trigger to the shotgun round to poor Harry Whittington. This was evidently Cheney's method of disowning the suggestion previously made by White House spokesman Scott McClellan that somehow Whittington was at fault for not following "the protocol [of] notifying the others that he was there." Instead, Cheney traces the causal path of the injury back to the gun in his hands. This was made more explicit in the full context of the admission:
Q: Right, and so you know all the procedures and how to maintain the proper line and distance between you and other hunters, and all that. So how, in your judgment, did this happen? Who — what caused this? What was the responsibility here?
A: Well, ultimately, I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry. And you can talk about all of the other conditions that existed at the time, but that's the bottom line. And there's no — it was not Harry's fault. You can't blame anybody else. I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend. And I say that is something I'll never forget.
There's another allusive echo in Cheney's causal chain — it evokes the old NRA slogan, "Guns don't kill people; people kill people." Geoff Pullum suggests the new elaborated version: "Guns don't kill people; rounds don't even kill people; not even triggers. People do." Thus Cheney's manful assertion of responsibility absolves not only Harry Whittington but also his own shotgun, lest any gun-control types seek to exploit the incident for political gain. To this I can only add the line from British comedian Eddie Izzard: "Guns don't kill people; people kill people. But monkeys do too... if they've got a gun."
Posted by Benjamin Zimmer at February 16, 2006 02:51 PM