I agree with this completely. I’d like to spend my declining years tripping holy karmic balls. At the same time Dan Savage has his head up his ass by complaining about the “passive voice.” It’s not. It’s about as forceful and straightforward an apology as any public figure has offered in years.
I am so ashamed of the double life that I have been living and am grieved for the hurt, pain and disgrace my sin has caused my wife and family
He’s ashamed, but pushes off the hurt, pain and disgrace onto his ‘sin’. Gag. :dubious:
Yeah I think the person meant “passivity” , meaning that he said the stuff just happened,
rather than “passive voice”, which is in grammar not meaning.
It’s the “I became unfaithful to my wife” line. It makes it sound like it’s something that was done to him rather than something he did. Active voice would be him saying “I cheated on my wife”.
Note the context he places it in: “I have secretly over the last several years been viewing pornography on the internet and this became a secret addiction and I became unfaithful to my wife.” He’s admitting he chose to watch porn but adultery was something that then happened to him. He’s implying pornography is the real culprit here; it led him astray and caused him to cheat.
I think that is it. From a strictly grammatical perspective, it is not a passive voice construction. What it does share with most passive voice constructions is a shift of responsibility, by emphasizing that certain things happened while downplaying who specifically did the relevant act. Saying “I became unfaithful” could imply that some sort of state or spirit of unfaithfulness was imposed upon the speaker by some unnamed and potentially malevolent external agent, rather than admitting that the unfaithfulness was a direct result of the speaker’s action.
I think what people might be calling out as “passive voice” is his second sentence.
He doesn’t say that he caused hurt, pain, and disgrace, but rather that was caused by “my sin”.
It’s not quite the passive voice. It isn’t “Hurt was caused”. But it does seem like trying to weasel out of accepting full responsibility for your actions.
It comes off sounding a lot more like “I am sorry you were hurt” than “I am sorry I hurt you”.*
*- Which is appropriate under some circumstances, but not in situations where the hurt was an entirely foreseeable result of your actions, which seems to be the case here.
I agree on all points. Of all the things that Savage could criticize, why would he criticize grammar? (However, note that Duggar blamed it on “his sin” rather than on himself.)
BTW his statement also contained other more direct statements of contrition that Savage conveniently omitted.
Pretty good catch. “I became” diminishes the link between his actions; apparently, TEH PR0N DID IT. :rolleyes:
To an actual Christian, the hypocrisy goes deeper. A confession must be personal and explicit. “Be merciful to me, for I am a sinner!” The porn didn’t make you do it. The Devil didn’t make you do it. You made you do it. Anything less is smokescreen and obfuscation, and the insincerity of your repentance will find you out.
From a Christian perspective he is not saying that the sin caused the pain and not him but rather acknowledging that the problem was not the hurt, pain, and disgrace but rather the inherent wrongness of the action. By calling the behavior “my sin” he is acknowledging the evilness of his actions.
Often this is the case because, in English discourse, we tend to put new and/or emphatic information toward the end of a sentence or clause, and, by the same token, we create cohesion with previous information (especially the topic, or the focus of the discourse) using the beginning information of a sentence or clause, which is often the grammatical subject.
Take, for example, the beginning of MLK’s speech during the March on Washington in 1963. The topic of the discourse at this point is “the Negro” (or “the life of the Negro,” i.e., the present condition of blacks):*But one hundred years later the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.
*In the second sentence he keeps the topic of the discourse in the subject position, and uses passive voice to place manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination at the end of the sentence, to reiteratively underscore the predicative from the first sentence (still not free). If King had been following the advice of many simplistic writing instructors, he might have mechanically (and mindlessly) eliminated the passive from the second sentence, ending up with this:*But one hundred years later the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination cripple the life of the Negro.*which might seem okay at first glance (it’s grammatically correct, etc.) but it detracts from the reiterative focus of the topic by taking the life of the Negro out of the subject position.
This happens in day-to-day discourse as well. You see a friend in crutches:*A: What happened to Suzy?
B: She got hit by a car!*It goes against the tendencies of English discourse to say, “A car hit her!” Instead, we use the get-passive voice here to keep the topic (Suzy, as the pronoun she) in the beginning of the sentence, creating cohesion by proximity, and putting the new, and frightening, information (a car) in the end of the sentence. This will be reinforced with rising intonation and stress on those last two words.
Thanks Guizot.
I became unfaithful sounds just like “I became sick” which is commonly thought not to be the fault of the person being ill.
I am a bit impatient with people using terms like “technically”, implying the verbs used are almost passive; active and passive are one of the few clear cut distinctions in English verbs.
The apology was a weaselly as it could be without using the passive voice, but it did not; the Duggars are nothing if not marketing geniuses.
Not just using the passive voice, but mixing two verb forms in the same sentence (because that should definitely be a semicolon after “free”). Is **anyone **going to say that Dr. King did it wrong?
That’s almost a subtle type of zeugma, isn’t it?
(Try finding the spelling of that if you’ve only heard it spoken - I finally had to look up “rhetorical device”.)
I sure don’t remember ever getting much of that stuff when I was in school, in any grade. Basic tenses, yes. Mood and voice and the perfect tenses, just barely. Never learned anything about subjunctive. A lot of the other exotic grammatical stuff that the educated people of SDMB discuss about English grammer – nothing.
FTFY: Wanting of [that] is done by me. 
Or maybe: Wanting of [that] by me has been happening.
If he’d said " hurt by my actions" would that be deflecting fault, as some think “hurt by my sin” is?
I don’t buy it. It’s a good apology and he’s accepting culpability. There are plenty of reasons to criticize Duggar, but criticizing his apology this way just proves that some folks have it out for him no matter what, and are going to find reasons to criticize even when there aren’t any.
For shame.
Dan Savage may have been wrong to call Duggar’s statement as being in the passive voice, and he also doesn’t actually say there’s anything wrong with that – just by mentioning it, he implies that Duggar was weaseling by using the alleged passive voice.
Here is the article I referred to that actually called it “abhorrent” – on Yahoo Celebrity, not Wonkette:
(I’m pretty sure the bit I quoted in the OP was the “original” of which this quote speaks – it includes the mention of pr0n.)
Nm.
At least he doesn’t seem to pass the blame on to his wife for failing him somehow, or to all those immodest females on Ashley whose cleavage, legs, and wiles led him astray.
I think, however, I saw something quoting his wife as taking some blame upon herself for not being there for him with her wifely counseling or something. But that’s getting a bit off-topic and into GD territory.
I fin your stance very odd because tense does not seem to be particularly emphasized in English. We go with a very reduced package of verb tenses and spend our linguistic brain power on other things.