George F. Will, "An Olympic Ego Trip", WaPo, 10/6/2009:
In the Niagara of words spoken and written about the Obamas' trip to Copenhagen, too few have been devoted to the words they spoke there. Their separate speeches to the International Olympic Committee were so dreadful, and in such a characteristic way, that they might be […]
Mary Kate Cary ("Barack Obama Journeys From 'Yes We Can' to the Imperial 'I'", U.S. News and World Report, 6/9/2009) joins the media chorus:
"The Great I Am." That's what Dorothy Walker Bush, the matriarch of the Bush family, used to call it when one of her children used too many "I's" in a sentence. Casting […]
The opening sentence of George F. Will's latest column ("Have We Got a Deal for You", 6/7/2009):
"I," said the president, who is inordinately fond of the first-person singular pronoun, "want to disabuse people of this notion that somehow we enjoy meddling in the private sector."
This echoes J.B.S. Haldane's quip that the creator, if he exists, […]
The "Bushisms" industry, mined so thoroughly by Slate's Jacob Weisberg for eight long years, is now a thing of the past. But Weisberg's colleague at Slate, Christopher Beam, got an exclusive scoop on a behind-the-scenes eleventh-hour Bushism when he managed to get into a farewell party for the outgoing administration on Sunday night. Here's what […]
From President-elect Obama's latest weekly YouTube Address:
I know that passing this plan won't be easy. I will need, and seek, support from Republicans and Democrats; and I'll be welcome to ideas and suggestions from both sides of the aisle. (emphasis added)
This sounds to me like an amalgam of
1. … ideas and suggestions will be welcome […]
We've spent a lot of electrons attacking the Bushisms industry — but we've never tried to make the argument that John Hinderaker put forward a couple of days ago, apparently in earnest ("The importance of being careful", 11/9/2008):
In this regard, President Bush is an excellent model; Obama should take a lesson from his example. Bush […]
I recently objected to Louis Menand's assertion that "[P]rofessional linguists almost universally, do not believe that any naturally occurring changes in the language can be bad" ("Menand on linguistic morality", 10/22/2008). And I was quickly taken to task in the comments by Steve Dodson, who is the erudite and broad-minded author of the Language Hat […]
In the Oct. 13 New Yorker, James Wood commented at length on Sarah Palin's pronunciation of verbiage in her interview with Sean Hannity ("Verbage: The Republican War on Words"), closing with this paragraph:
Hearing her being interviewed by Sean Hannity, on Fox News, almost made one wish for a Republican victory in November, so that her […]
Eager as always to score high-school snark points, Maureen Dowd wrote today about Sarah Palin ("Sarah's Pompom Palaver", 10/5/2008):
Then she uttered yet another sentence that defies diagramming: “It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right […]
Comedy Central is currently showcasing this "astoundingly popular" video clip from The Daily Show:
Throughout the clip, Jon Stewart juxtaposes comments about [Alaska Governor and Republican V.P. nominee] Sarah Palin by [former Republican strategist] Karl Rove, [FoxNews blowhard] Bill O'Reilly, ["lying sack of shit"] Dick Morris, and [McCain's senior policy advisor] Nancy Pfotenhauer with other comments […]
What with all the controversy over Sarah Palin's views and (lack of) qualifications to be President, as far as I can tell thus far no one has claimed that she is prone to linguistic errors. That's really too bad. If only she would make the right sort of error, rather than the mundane bushisms we […]
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California appeared on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday, and he got some press attention for his stated willingness to serve as an energy and environment czar in a hypothetical Obama adminstration, even though he has endorsed his fellow Republican John McCain. In the recaps of his interview, I was struck by […]
Count me among those who will not be at all sad to see the last of the Bushisms industry. In the end, it's a bit like making wheelchair jokes about FDR, except that all of us commit infelicities of verbal expression from time to time. I guess that W gets tangled up a bit more […]