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A gerund too far?

James Taranto starts out his latest Best of the Web column with some clever wordplay, based on the status of English as a semi-negative-concord language ("He Hasn't Accomplished Nothing", 12/1/2009): Slate's Jacob Weisberg doesn't think Barack Obama has accomplished nothing, and Weisberg ain't usin' no bad grammar neither. Weisberg disputes the "conventional wisdom about Obama"–to […]

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The last Bushism?

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 […]

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Thematic relations from both sides of the aisle

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 […]

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Verbage

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 […]

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Sarah Palin

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 […]

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The last Bushism?

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 […]

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