The Facebook case is just one of many where forensic linguists studying authorship attribution have become key expert witnesses in litigation proceedings. Their expertise has also been sought by law enforcement agencies in the hunt for criminal suspects. One famous case is that of the Unabomber, where textual clues were key in identifying Ted Kaczynski as the author of the Unabomber’s manifesto in 1996. For instance, the manifesto used the phrase “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too,” instead of the more typical “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.” The “eat/have” word order is, in a way, more logical, and also happens to predate the “have/eat” order — see my On Language reader response for more. Ted Kaczynski had used the “eat/have” version in known letters (his brother David said that their mother had taught them that was the way the expression should be), and this was one of the pieces of evidence that helped FBI agents convince a judge to issue a search warrant of Kaczynski’s Montana cabin.
- Does E-Mail Have Fingerprints? By Ben Zimmer, Vocabulary.com, July 28, 2011.
About the author:
Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.
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