The last Bushism?
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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 often than most politicians do, although I think that even this much is not entirely certain.
At least the collection has limited itself in recent years to documented quotes rather than bar-room anecdotes. This one can be found in "Interview of the President by Hisham Bourar, Al Hurra TV", 1/4/2008:
I can press when there needs to be pressed; I can hold hands when there needs to be — hold hands. And so I'm — I will go to encourage them to stay focused on the big picture. There's going to be all kinds of distractions, and people will be trying to throw up roadblocks and people will be trying to cause these gentlemen to — not to — lose sight of what's possible. And my job is to help them keep a vision on what is possible.
Marc Naimark said,
June 22, 2008 @ 9:28 am
Not a linguist here, and I know that this habit of noting "Bushisms" is not appreciated on LL, but it does seem to me that in general experience, there is a link between clarity of speech and clarity of thought. Everyone misspeaks from time to time, but Bushism go beyond normal "infelicities of verbal expression". To ignore them and reflection of lack of clear thinking, is to make allowances that have had deadly consequences.
James Chittleborough said,
June 22, 2008 @ 10:35 am
Normally I find these things as tiresome as anyone . . . but I really, really want to know how they translated that one into Arabic.
Ryan said,
June 22, 2008 @ 11:21 am
Thank goodness for term limits in the USA. Americans are usually more than ready to move on to another leader after eight years. The current and past presidents of the USA have been quite polemic, I hope that the next one will have a little bit more of a calming, inspiring and uniting presence.
Jean-Sébastien Girard said,
June 22, 2008 @ 12:22 pm
I think Bushisms (and their Canadian equivalent "Chrétienneries") are due not so much to the amount of infelicities, but the combinations of a particularly frequently-heard official and the sheer ludicrous of some of these statements (e.g. Chrétien once said "I am not a lawyer, I can't explain all the details of the law." Problem is, he DOES hold a law degree.).
Arnold Zwicky said,
June 22, 2008 @ 12:23 pm
Marc Naimark: "it does seem to me that in general experience, there is a link between clarity of speech and clarity of thought." So people say, but never with any explanation of what counts as clarity of speech and what counts as clarity of thought and what the nature of the link between them could be. Instead, speech that is ill-formed in one way or another (even if entirely comprehensible) is interpreted as evidence of defect in thought; "it just stands to reason", people say. Well, it seems to me that this is not very clear thinking.
People differ considerably in their ability to produce fluent well-formed speech. This is a skill all on its own. Some people have this skill but use it to express faulty reasoning, dubious claims, and the like. Others reformulate on their feet, change direction in mid-speech trying to find a better way to get something across, and so on, while still having good points to make. (From many years of working with students, I can attest that both things happen.)
Naimark: "Everyone misspeaks from time to time, but Bushism[s] go beyond normal "infelicities of verbal expression"." That's your impression, but this is a factual claim, which requires some demonstration. It might in fact be true, but no one has shown this. Instead, people just search Bush's unscripted speech for awful examples; such selective attention is guaranteed to produce the impression that Bush's error rate is very high (in contrast to other speakers), and that his errors are unusually severe.
What we are doing on Language Log is not praising Bush's unscripted speech; the man is clearly not very good at producing fluent well-formed speech on his feet. But that's true of lots of people in the public eye, including many other politicians. (It's a dispiriting exercise to listen to the unscripted speech of most politicians, especially when you discount the portions that are probably memorized. There are a few highly skilled speakers, but most are not at all impressive.)
We care about the issue on Language Log because language is being used as a political weapon, without any demonstration that it's relevant. This is deplorable, even when the weapon is used against someone I detest.
Garrett Wollman said,
June 22, 2008 @ 2:12 pm
Arnold Zwicky: "Marc Naimark: 'it does seem to me that in general experience, there is a link between clarity of speech and clarity of thought.' So people say, but never with any explanation of what counts as clarity of speech and what counts as clarity of thought and what the nature of the link between them could be."
It took me a very long time to understand that there were people — perhaps even a majority of people — for whom thought and speech were qualitatively different activities. If language-oriented people like me are projecting their own experience onto Bush, it would account for some of the reaction towards his verbal missteps.
I would also note that Bush rarely exhibits any self-consciousness over his mistakes. I think public speakers today are often taught just to plow through without acknowledging errors (for various entirely plausible reasons), but if one is not a particularly facile speaker, it does contribute to a perception of unawareness which can't be good for Mr. Bush's reputation.
Chris Henrich said,
June 22, 2008 @ 2:41 pm
I think that President Bush's spoken mishaps are not a very important issue. I have known extremely intelligent people who suffered many failures of fluency.
President Kennedy's news conferences were broadcast live and transcribed in the New York Times. They were full of utterances every bit as disheveled as Mr. Bush's.
JJM said,
June 22, 2008 @ 3:27 pm
As far as I'm concerned, Bush as a real person ceased to exist several years ago.
His most virulent political critics have succeeded in creating a complete caricature of his identity. As a consequence, any reasoned public debate of his strengths and weaknesses is no longer possible.
Lest you think I am simply picking on the political left, I must tell you that I am already detecting a similar tendency towards Obama from the right end of the spectrum.
mollymooly said,
June 22, 2008 @ 3:52 pm
The Bushism is the flip side of the soundbite. People deplore the supposed rise of soundbite culture. Picking out unscripted errors might be tied to picking out planted soundbites. Or not.
Tarlach said,
June 22, 2008 @ 4:23 pm
People are unfairly picking on Bush because of the way he talks? Is that what is being said here? People are just arbritraly pointing out these little verbal foibles, that apparently Jack Kennedy made just as much but wasn't arbritraily picked on about, and running with it just becacue some vast left-wing conspiracy?
Oskar Sigvardsson said,
June 22, 2008 @ 4:39 pm
Marc Naimark: "it does seem to me that in general experience, there is a link between clarity of speech and clarity of thought."
This isn't true in my experience. Of the intelligent people I've met in my life, many, if not most of them, are not competent communicators. Especially mathematicians, people who can race through the most complex arguments faster and more clearly than any human alive. Ever asked a mathematician what he is working on? Ever sat next to one at a party?
And on the other hand, I've known many people who aren't perhaps all that bright use rhetoric that is out of Shakespeare.
I'm not trying to make a connection here, I've known many people who are smart and can communicate well (and vice versa), what I'm trying to say is that I don't really think there is a connection. These are different skills. Some people can do both, some people can do neither, and most people have varying degrees of each.
dporpentine said,
June 22, 2008 @ 4:51 pm
Good God. When did Language Log get overtaken by all these Sensible people?
"His most virulent political critics have succeeded in creating a complete caricature of his identity. As a consequence, any reasoned public debate of his strengths and weaknesses is no longer possible."
How many American historians have to come forward asserting that, in their considered opinion, George Bush is the worst American president in history before even Sensible Americans admit that he essentially has no strengths? Or at least his strengths, such as they might be, are so few and so meager that to weigh them in balance against his perversions of his duties is to mock the very idea of justly weighing the evidence of anything at all. Just as "gopher" is not a pronoun, Bush is not a middling president.
"We care about the issue on Language Log because language is being used as a political weapon, without any demonstration that it's relevant. This is deplorable, even when the weapon is used against someone I detest."
Bushisms are not being used as a political weapon in any meaningful sense–and the idea that making fun of how Bush speaks is comparable to making fun of FDR's using a wheelchair is laughable. Making fun of how Bush talks is bringing a Nerf to a nuclear exchange. People in his administration–people right next to him, like Karl Rove–gleefully use US attorneys to take down political opponents . . . and a few people get their jollies by making fun of Bush's poor speaking skills. These are not ethically comparable. And for anyone on Language Log to pretend otherwise suggests a set of ethical priorities that seem to me seriously awry.
Leicester Pig said,
June 22, 2008 @ 5:19 pm
Tarlach said, People are unfairly picking on Bush because of the way he talks? Is that what is being said here?
No, not even that. They're saying people are unfairly picking on the way Bush talks, and it's unfair because everyone talks like that.
Geoff Pullum recently wrote a similar piece about the British politician John Prescott being unfairly stigmatised for using bad grammar, so this is obviously an issue for linguists at the moment. I agree that most people talk ungrammatically most of the time, and as Arnold Zwicky says, people change their thinking in mid speech, but I would like to see some evidence that all other politicians say as many equally stupid things as Bush, and with equal frequency. Until then, Bushisms remain funny to everyone other than Republicans and linguists.
johnson said,
June 22, 2008 @ 5:36 pm
Leicester Pig said: They're saying people are unfairly picking on the way Bush talks, and it's unfair because everyone talks like that.
No, they're saying that people point out "Bushisms" as if they were evidence that he's a bad president, but the fact that he makes silly verbal missteps is actually not relevant to his presidential worth (or lack thereof). This fits with Language Log's general opposition to prescriptivism. As long as people can understand what Bush is saying, the fact that he makes grammatical and other errors isn't really important. The content of his statements is.
Fair enough, Language Log. But it's still funny. "I can press when there needs to be pressed"? How could you not laugh at that?
Peter said,
June 22, 2008 @ 6:43 pm
Marc Naimark said: "but it does seem to me that in general experience, there is a link between clarity of speech and clarity of thought."
First fundamental question: How could we ever assess the extent of clarity of a person's thought except through an examination of their speech (or, equivalently, writing)? Clarity of thought is not something which is directly observable, which therefore makes the concept problematic to include as part of any scientific explanation IMO.
Second fundamental question: In any case, what evidence is there that everyone thinks using language? The evidence that exists would seem to suggest that people employ a variety of means of thinking in addition to language (eg, in images, with sound and music, physically or kinetically, etc). Even very intelligent people – perhaps, especially very intelligent people – may use other modes in addition to, or instead of, language. Was Felix Mendelssohn, polymath (fluent in German, Latin, ancient Greek, French, Italian and English), poet, translater of Horace and Terence, and a superb stylist as a letter-writer, revealing an inability to think clearly when he said that he wrote music in order to express that which he could not express in words?
Timothy M said,
June 22, 2008 @ 7:09 pm
There's something about this issue that doesn't seem right to me. I'll see if I can express it briefly:
We're taught in school to speak and write well because how we speak and write reflects back on us. Bush's inability to speak well reflects negatively on him, and now some people are, if I understand correctly, defending him by saying that as long as the meaning is understood, it's okay. But oration has never been just about getting meaning across – it's about getting meaning across in a way that impresses, and sometimes convinces or inspires people. If I flubbed up during a speech the same way Bush has flubbed up during many of his, my speech would be the worse because of it. That's the standard I, and I think many people hold themselves to. Why should we not hold Bush to that standard as well?
johnson said,
June 22, 2008 @ 7:42 pm
I'm not necessarily agreeing w/ Language Log here, but the point is that being a good orator and being a good president aren't the same thing. Yes, Bush's flubs make his speeches worse. But that doesn't by itself make him a bad executive. And note, by the way, that \Zwicky implies that he "detests" Bush (as do I). It's the principle, not the man, that is being defended here.
Leon said,
June 22, 2008 @ 8:48 pm
I think there are a few issues potentially being conflated here. Bush has an especially "straight-shooting" oratorical style, for example, and, based on the testimony of Tony Blair (and the "Yo Blair!" incident), he is also quite blokey and easygoing in person.
This reminds me of an incident in Australian politics. In 1996 Pauline Hanson, later the leader of the anti-immigration/protectionist One Nation party, was asked on our 60 Minutes if she was xenophobic. Her response — "please explain?" — instantly became a sensation. I was in primary school at the time, and kids would be derisively regurgitating that line without even knowing the question it was in response to (even less so the meaning of "xenophobia").
Leicester Pig said,
June 23, 2008 @ 5:28 am
What Timothy M said.
Respond, linguists!
Bill Muir said,
June 23, 2008 @ 7:22 am
Timothy M and Leicester Pig: Well I'm not a linguist… unless a linguist is suddenly something like what I am. But what you (Timothy M) said galled me a bit.
"We're taught in school to speak and write well because how we speak and write reflects back on us."
By people who themselves learned there's only one right way to speak and write, yes we were. I don't trust people who see things in such black-and-white terms, even if they teach in good faith.
"Bush's inability to speak well reflects negatively on him, and now some people are, if I understand correctly, defending him by saying that as long as the meaning is understood, it's okay. But oration has never been just about getting meaning across – it's about getting meaning across in a way that impresses, and sometimes convinces or inspires people."
That's your opinion, but frankly I'd be quite pleased with a politician's speech being simply informative. Anyway, nobody says that a person can do no wrong as long as their meaning is understood (although I've come close to saying this when accused of using improper punctuation in a chat room… I mean, o rly?). For one thing, no two people will interpret what our president says the same way, for purely political reasons…. I may choose to think what he's saying is moronic because I'm a Democrat and I don't like him, and that's what Bushisms are all about. So lets stop bludgeoning him over language when there are so many substantive flaws in his policies.
"If I flubbed up during a speech the same way Bush has flubbed up during many of his, my speech would be the worse because of it. That's the standard I, and I think many people hold themselves to. Why should we not hold Bush to that standard as well?"
First of all, Bush gives at least an order of magnitude (maybe two or three) more speeches and interviews than you do. Second of all, you seem to be saying that people should all hold themselves to the same standard you do, which I really don't condone. I say everyone must start saying "frobozz" when they mean "dictionary." I believe everyone should be held to that standard, which is obviously a good enough reason for you, so I'll be surprised when you don't do it.
Geoff Pullum said,
June 23, 2008 @ 7:30 am
Leicester Pig wants a response from a linguist to Timothy M. Well, I think what we tend to agree on here at Language Log Plaza is that (1) clear and grammatical use of the language is certainly a virtue; but (2) in unprepared speech everyone fluffs and mangles things a bit; and (3) this doesn't always mean they are unintelligent or that they don't have a coherent thought they're trying to express; and (4) although the Bushism collectors imply that Bush is a much worse fluffer and mangler than any normal person, they haven't provided quantitative evidence to that effect. I don't think there's any inconsistency in (1)-(4), is there?
dr pepper said,
June 23, 2008 @ 7:59 am
Peter said,
> what evidence is there that everyone thinks using language?
I'm pretty sure that *no one* thinks in language. Language is how we present our thoughts to the outside world.
Leicester Pig said,
June 23, 2008 @ 8:23 am
Geoff Pullum said, "I don't think there's any inconsistency in (1)-(4), is there?"
No inconsistancy, no, and thanks for the clarification of Plaza policy, but it doesn't show that Bushisms are inherently unfunny, nor that oratorical skill is no virtue in a politician.
Trix said,
June 23, 2008 @ 9:13 am
Picking up on this:
How could we ever assess the extent of clarity of a person's thought except through an examination of their speech (or, equivalently, writing)? and riffing a bit. Assuming that we could actually assess the clarity of a person's thought through those means, they are not the same thing.
To throw in an anecdotal datapoint, my speech is not that great. I think too fast for talking (at least, that's how I explain it), I get my sequence of ideas confused, I ramble, I forget my conclusion, I don't pitch things correctly to the audience, and I sometimes even stutter. I don't often use an actual incorrect word, though.
My writing, however, is an order of magnitude better than my speech, thank god. I can edit, and I don't get flustered or stage fright while writing.
I would think that someone who is supposedly the most powerful leader of the world should have a better grasp of spoken English – I would be interested in a real analysis of how often Bush uses the wrong words, rather than just clumsy constructions that we're all prone to – but I don't think his poor speech necessarily indicates his level of intelligence. Tempting as it might be to assume so.
Timothy M said,
June 23, 2008 @ 9:21 am
In response to Geoff Pullum: Thanks for the reply, and no I don't think there's any inconsistency in 1-4, either.
After thinking about this for a while, I realized that I was not entirely separating in my mind the "ability to produce fluent well-formed speech" (as Arnold Zwicky wrote it), and the ability to think coherent thoughts. Operating under the assumption that the two must necessarily be connected, I thought that a lack of the former must entail a failing in the latter. But if the two can be separated (and it would seem logical that they can), then I must admit that my conclusion was false.
Thanks for the discussion.
Ellen K. said,
June 23, 2008 @ 9:22 am
Dr Pepper, some of us do think in language, some of the time. As Peter, said, one of many ways of thinking. It's not the only way I think, and I'm certainly not limited to only thinking things I can put into words, still, I use language in my thinking quite a lot.
John O'Toole said,
June 23, 2008 @ 11:20 am
Gosh, I hope I'm not being too flippant but the very first posting, by Marc Naimark, decrying the allowances made for linguistic infelicities and the deadly consequences they purportedly have had, has… yes! Two infelicities: "Everyone misspeaks from time to time, but Bushism go beyond normal 'infelicities of verbal expression'. To ignore them and reflection of lack of clear thinking, is to make allowances that have had deadly consequences."
"Bushism go beyond normal 'infelicities of verbal expression'…" Oops, Mr. Naimark meant to write "Bushisms," correcto mondo? Then "To ignore them and reflection of lack of clear thinking, is to make allowances…" I had to stop and reread that one (and work it out) before I understood that "to ignore them and their/the reflection of a/his lack of clear thinking…" etcetry etcetry. Obviously that rule (what number was it?) about making a verbal mistake as soon as one points out verbal mistakes in a bit of speech or writing still holds.
More important, I'm not so sure "deadly consequences" have sprung from making allowances of this sort for Mr. Bush's lack of verbal dexterity. From a lack of planning, from a lumbering application of policy, from an incuriosity about the world, from any number of concrete decisions, perhaps so. In fact, one could argue that Mr. Bush's handling of the question of his less-than-stellar language skills by repositioning the terms of the debate to an "aw, shucks, I'm just one of the guys, speechifin' is for them pointy heads" reading of his garbled talk bespeaks (ha!) a sly intelligence. Either he was smart enough to know he had to parry that criticism, or was smart enough to choose clever advisers to tell him how to do so.
I wonder how often our criticism of how someone handles their (go Language Log!) accepted formal standard tongue actually follows our conclusion about their intelligence, integrity, trustworthiness, etc., rather than informs that conclusion? Possible experiment: subjects are asked to rate the character of a person (in fact a recording of an unknown actor speaking–poorly–about anything other than politics). In some instances, the "profile" of the person given to the subjects before listening is very close to the subjects' own outlook; in others, a diametrically opposite "profile" is selected. Subjects are asked to rate the person for all sorts of things, including language use (buried in there with "voice quality," "knowledge of topic," "intelligence," and so on). Has this experiment been done? I'd be surprised if judging the actor's intelligence and language skills didn't vary wildly according to how the actor was perceived from the start.
In any case, all of the above observations have, I fear, been covered by Language Log in the past! Bis repetita placent–applies to my remarks (I hope) and the Bushism industry.
linda seebach said,
June 23, 2008 @ 11:26 am
Temple Grandin, who is autistic, titled her book about her life and her career "Thinking in Pictures." Having had the chance to interview her, I can testify that her impromptu speech is well formed and fluent — unusually so, in fact — but as she told me, speaking is for her like doing simultaneous translation.
I told her that I sometimes dream in three columns of justified type, and she thought that was hilarious.
James Wimberley said,
June 23, 2008 @ 11:46 am
George Walker Bush is a professional politician; like an advocate or writer or lecturer, a person who makes a living out of speech, to inform, persuade or sometimes provoke. He should therefore be held to a higher, professional standard of speech. Blair or Obama simply don't talk, unscripted, like insecure teenagers. When Bush performs this visible part of his job so badly, aren't we entitled to infer problems with the invisible part? It's possible of course to be incoherent in speech and good at one's job; but not I think in politics.
Peter said,
June 23, 2008 @ 12:39 pm
To add to my previous comment:
Anyone who has worked much with mathematicians or engineers, as I have, will realize that thinking in pictures is widespread and frequent among some groups of people. To ask such people about their thoughts often requires them to translate their mental pictures into words, so that what one hears (or sees written) is in fact a translation from one mode of concept representation to another. One should not be surprised to learn that when communicating with each other engineers often draw pictures.
Moreover, anyone who has worked much with philosophers or lawyers, as I also have, will realize that thinking in words is widespread among some other groups of people. IME, lawyers rarely draw pictures, even when communicating only with each other.
The situation gets interesting when these different types of people have to interact with one another — lawyers with engineers, say. I have a lot of experience of such interactions, and I doubt that any intelligent person would infer from such interactions that all modes of thinking are the same, or that human intelligence deploys only one mode of representation. I am always suprised how non-obvious this is to many people, but I guess most people tend to work mainly with like-minded people.
Paul Wilkins said,
June 23, 2008 @ 3:53 pm
Now here was a dangerous thread to leave open…
We need to (as a culture) dump on someone. Without the Other, we are not ourselves. Often the Other is Celebrity. And what better celebrity to deride than a president who is, to put it mildly, not particularly cared for by a sizable chunk of the more erudite among us? Bush has inspired this hyperbolic attention and who are we to deny him it?
In a capitalist society, folks are bound to seize upon anything to try to make a buck, hence the vast number of books, articles and whatnots out there about Bush. Taking into account the stuff that portrays Bush negatively, I would posit that we eat Bushisms up because it's like a deep-fried snack that allows us to guffaw at his expense without having to invest anything serious into the endeavor. They're cheap and easy.
I think that there is quite a bit of evidence in the corpus to suggest Bush is not the most intelligent egg in the bunch – the way he mangles economic theory, the politically motivated redaction of science as an attack on reason, his flat out rejection of reality, jeez, I could make myself sick just sitting here thinking about it all.
It might be best for you's to hold your nose, because, like it or not, we are not going to listen to reason on this. We are going to snort, snicker, chortle and snark at him until he's long gone. Because it's fun and easy.
Andy Hollandbeck said,
June 23, 2008 @ 4:03 pm
James Wimberley: "George Walker Bush is a professional politician; like an advocate or writer or lecturer, a person who makes a living out of speech, to inform, persuade or sometimes provoke. He should therefore be held to a higher, professional standard of speech."
This is poppycock. Most "official" speeches that politicians give are scripted — written by another person who has a stronger grasp on the nuances of English. Bush doesn't make a living out of giving speeches. You don't vote for a politician because of his or her language abilities. Living up to "a professional standard of speech" has nothing to do with why one should work in government.
The only people who should be "held to a higher, professional standard of speech" are those whose whole profession is about speaking: Tom Brokaw, for instance. If George Bush, or Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton were to suddenly lose their ability to speak, they could still do their jobs, and do them well.
I, for one, look forward to Obamisms. Seeing and hearing the president make a mistake reminds us all that we're all human, and that nobody's perfect. People seem to want our politicians, and especially our president, to be superhuman. That just ain't gonna happen.
MrTimbo said,
June 23, 2008 @ 6:25 pm
Bushisms, to my mind, are okay to enjoy or remark on when W has arrived at a formulation which is actually funny or which has an edge of irony such as the famous, "Is our children learning?" But I did notice that the examples in the Slate series of Bushisms were frequently unremarkable.
Josh Millard said,
June 23, 2008 @ 6:54 pm
it doesn't show that Bushisms are inherently unfunny
I'm right there with you, to a degree. I think many of them are funny, in a limited Nelson-from-The-Simpsons context where I'm seeing the leader of the free world drop the ball.
But there's a couple things that mitigate that quiet chuckle:
1. Fetishizing the gaffes, making them into some kind of totemic ammunition, as if, if you believe that GW is a lousy President, this is the thing you want to try and make your point with. As if inanely repeating a moment of disfluency is going to do anything but annoy folks in the long run. It makes the folks who had a quick chuckle feel embarrassed by association; so too the less-rabid ideological compadres.
2. Furthering the notion that harping on these things is somehow in the service of actual, worthwhile language discussion. Like an angry pedant who has mistaken peeveblogging for linguistics, and in the process helped continue to muddy the ideas of Joe Layman and about is and isn't actually interesting about language usage and speech errors and a million other things. Here, the embarrassment-by-association goes to the folks who actually care with any nuance about language. Linguists, I'd say, in particular.
It's one thing to giggle when someone you dislike stumbles into a mud puddle. It's another thing entirely to go around calling him Mud Puddle for the next six years and declaring yourself a champion of the dry-cleaning industry by implication.
Quicksand said,
June 23, 2008 @ 7:24 pm
Well, I won't even try to weigh the likelihood of these possible outcomes in the present case, but I think:
(a) incoherent thought processes are unlikely to result in fluent and well-formed unscripted speech; but
(b) frequent "infelicities of verbal expression" do not necessarily reflect incoherent thought processes.
So while a strong ability to improvise at least suggests a keen and agile intellect, it's close to impossible to judge a speaker's intellectual capacity based purely on the delivery of unscripted remarks.
I'm an attorney, and I think a good one, but for the reasons noted above I'm not a litigator.
Neil said,
June 24, 2008 @ 1:32 am
There has to be a correlation between clear speech and clear thinking. Here's why: every clearly expressed statement expresses a clear thought (it is possible to accidentally say something that sounds clear, but the probability is low). It does not follow that every unclear, mangled or vague statement is the expression of an unclear thought; indeed, it is false that this is so. But given that almost all clear statements express clear thoughts, there is a higher probability that someone who often mangles statements is not clear thinker. Of course, this leaves the quantitative question aside: does Bush do this more than others? My guess is yes, but it could be an effect of media coverage (plus the fact that of course the president is more often recorded than others).
Leicester "50øre" Pig said,
June 24, 2008 @ 2:14 am
@ the great Josh Millard:
I agree with your point 2, but because you laugh when the leader of the free world drops the ball doesn't mean you always think it's funny whenever someone drops the ball. Or falls in the mud puddle.
Regarding point 1, I think these speech gaffes are special to Bush, just as the quotes of Rumsfeld were special to Rumsfeld. I wouldn't mistake the speaker of, "We understand the fright that can come when you are worried about a rocket landing on top of your home": it's got to be Bush. Could it have been Obama, or McCain? No. That's the point, not that an error was made in grammar.
And I think the thing that annoys folks in the long run is that he has been a lousy president.
Leicester "50øre" Pig said,
June 24, 2008 @ 2:31 am
@ the great Josh Millard:
I agree with your point 2, but because you laugh when the leader of the free world drops the ball doesn't mean you always think it's funny whenever someone drops the ball. Or falls in the mud puddle.
Regarding point 1, I think these speech gaffes are special to Bush, just as the quotes of Rumsfeld were special to Rumsfeld. I wouldn't mistake the speaker of, "We understand the fright that can come when you're worried about a rocket landing on top of your home": it's got to be Bush. Could it have been Obama, or McCain? No. That's the point, not that an error was made in grammar.
And I think the thing that annoys folks in the long run is that he has been a lousy president.
Joe said,
June 24, 2008 @ 4:56 am
> I'm pretty sure that *no one* thinks in language. Language is how we present our thoughts to the outside world.
The majority of my thoughts manifest themselves to me as a copy of my voice that exists only in my mind, speaking to myself. Unless that's not what you mean by "thinks in language," your statement isn't true.
That said I can certainly conjure up pictures, but nothing else is even close to being as vivid as those thoughts rendered as sound in my mind. It takes a lot more concentration for me to think any differently and I can't even type if that mental voice is otherwise occupied.
Leicester Pig, 50 øre said,
June 24, 2008 @ 6:37 am
@ Josh Millard:
I agree with point 2, but because you laugh when the leader of the free world drops the ball doesn't mean you always think it's funny whenever someone drops the ball. Or falls in the mud puddle.
Point 1, I think these speech gaffes are special to Bush, just as the quotes of Rumsfeld were special to Rumsfeld. I wouldn't mistake the speaker of, "We understand the fright that can come when you are worried about a rocket landing on top of your home": it's got to be Bush. Could it have been Obama, or McCain? No. That's the point, not that an error was made in grammar.
And I think the thing that annoys folks in the long run is that he has been a lousy president.
Leicester Pig said,
June 24, 2008 @ 7:36 am
@ Josh, my computer (or LL's) was having a bit of trouble, obviously, so I hope you didn't bother reading that 3 times.
I forgot to say I very much enjoyed the mud-puddle metaphor, and may use it myself. A washer/dryer beats the dry-cleaners for most dirty clothing (no need to try decoding that, I mean it literally).
Ellen K. said,
June 24, 2008 @ 7:56 am
Neil: There has to be a correlation between clear speech and clear thinking. Here's why: every clearly expressed statement expresses a clear thought
It it quite possible to clearly express twisted thinking.
Randy Alexander said,
June 24, 2008 @ 8:01 am
I agree that making lists of Bushisms is a little banal, and one could do that with anybody's mistakes, but there are different kinds of mistakes.
I don't think native English speakers normally 1) make mistakes with BE verbs, and if they did, 2) leave them uncorrected. He's on record at least twice doing just that.
I don't think the frequency of his errors says so much. A more interesting study would be on the types of his errors, comparing those with other politicians.
Jay Livingston said,
June 25, 2008 @ 7:09 pm
"it's a bit like making wheelchair jokes about FDR, except that all of us commit infelicities of verbal expression from time to time."
1. In most cases, people in the "Bushism industry" aren't making jokes. They are merely reporting verbatim what the president said.
2. I question the usefulness of this analogy between polio and clumsy speech. Dress might be a more apt comparison; it's like having a president who frequently showed up in ill-fitting suits, ugly shirts, and a stained necktie (or perhaps a hole in the sole of his shoe). Gaffes of style offend those who think a president should look the part and dress well — as verbal gaffes offend some people who are interested in language, interested enough, say, to read blogs on the subject.
3. I would really like to see research on whether these verbal miscues correlate with other qualities of mind. It seems to me that Bush doesn't think about what he's saying, doesn't think two words ahead. It also seems he doesn't think very deeply about policy; rather than think through a problem, he prefers quick and simple choices for action. But I'm not convinced that these two qualities generally go together.
4. I'm also skeptical about how any of these qualities of mind are related to the failure of the Bush presidency. If Bush had died his first week in office, we'd have had President Cheney — more thoughtful and better spoken, but giving us the same policies.
Aaron Davies said,
June 26, 2008 @ 12:44 am
Three points:
Regarding the opinions of professional historians, get back to me in fifty years.
Regarding rhetorical ability in politicians, I prefer its absence. The concept "politician with great power to persuade" is best encapsulated in the word "demagogue".
Regarding modes of thought, I find that I flip between two modes: explicit internal speech and a basically formless mode that seems to have no sensory metaphor at all. I think the latter is a bit like what happens when one (or at least when I) read at "full speed"–i.e. not one word at a time, as I might have to do when reading a poorly constructed sentence, or in a language I'm only moderately fluent in. Ideas seem to "float to the top" of my mind without any particular sense cues associated with them, and only become linguistically expressed if they need to be.
James Wimberley said,
June 26, 2008 @ 9:26 am
My anodyne remark that the ability to speak clearly is a professional qualification in a career politician like George Bush has sparked two responses – both negative. And this on a strongly academic and somewhat lefty blog! What's wrong with American voters when they don't automatically look for someone smarter, more knowledgeable, harder working, more honest – and more eloquent – than themselves in a candidate for high elected office? The Emperor Claudius' Greek freedman Narcissus once put down a mutiny of Roman legionaries (encamped I think near Boulogne) simply by speaking to them. That's the sort of speaking skills to look for.
Leicestershire Piglet said,
June 26, 2008 @ 1:13 pm
James Wimberley said "What's wrong with American voters when they don't automatically look for someone…more eloquent"
I wonder if it's perhaps Hitler's and some other despots' legacy to have made people more wary than they were in the past of eloquent and persuasive speaking.
Dr Benway said,
June 27, 2008 @ 7:03 am
People would cut Bush slack for occasional garbled output if he sometimes said something compelling. It's the dearth of unscripted, well spoken argument from Bush that gives the flubs weight.