Don't Misunderestimate Bushisms; They Resignate

Hmm... now wait just a second here... bushisms may be cute (my personal fav is "strategery") but some of these aren't bushisms.

"resignate" is phonetically the same sound as "resonate". Bushisms aren't written words, they are spoken words. You can't spell it differently and call it a bushism.

Isn't "foreign-handed" just somebody not listening closely? Isn't it actually written as "four-in-handed"? The four-in-hand knot is the simplest and smallest knots for the tying of a man's tie. To say that one has a four-in-handed foreign policy is to say that it is simple and easy to understand and execute. It is a *more* not *less* sophisticated use of language.

Willie, there was a wire story in our local paper (which means it was in papers all over the place) about some group who voted on the Buzzwords Of The Year - words that should be banned from all use within the media.

The one (actually, fraternal twin) buzzword I'm most sick of is the intellectually lazy

Jump-start or
Kick-start

when used to describe any economic program. News writers across the country have glommed onto "jump-start" and "kick-start" as synonyms for "stimulus" to such a horrifying degree that it's hard NOT to find them in news copy. Writers use these terms because they think they sound snappy and colorful and are easily recognized for what they mean. But not after the 840,000th time!

We had some weather smarm tell us the other day that a cold front would kick-start some snow showers. PLEASE!

Rush has long maintained that not all of the bias in the news media is intentional. A lot of it comes from laziness. This is a prime example.

Michael

President George W. Bush pronounced malfeasance without its s in July 2002, adding to the growing collection of his verbal gaffes, dubbed Bushisms. Websites listing Bushisms are legion. Bush has a well-documented habit of tripping over words, especially when, as with subliminal and malfeasance, they’re somewhat bookish.

The President has been much castigated for his pronunciation of the word nuclear as “NOO-kyuh-luhr.” Dictionaries prefer a pronunciation in line with the spelling, either as “NOO-klee-uhr” or “NYOO-klee-uhr.” As Jesse Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary noted in a recent article in The New York Times (“Confronting ‘NOO-kyuh-luhr’ Proliferation”), past presidents, including Eisenhower and Ford, also said nuclear the way George W. Bush does. Jimmy Carter had a different though still “nonstandard” way of saying nuclear (sounding something like “NYOO-kee-uhr”), and he did graduate work in nuclear physics.

The trouble with nuclear, according to Enid Pearsons, pronunciation editor emeritus for Random House dictionaries, is that the word has a very unusual sound pattern for an English word--three syllables, with stress on the first syllable, and -cle-ar as the final two syllables. Amazingly, no other common English word has exactly this pattern; cochlear is very close, but not nearly as frequent. “NOO-kyuh-luhr”-sayers, who number in the many millions, in fact, move the l in nuclear to the final syllable and thus avoid the unusual pattern. (Linguists refer to this sound-switching process as metathesis.) Thus nuclear takes on a more familiar sound pattern, similar to everyday English words like circular and muscular.

So, in his pronunciation of nuclear, Bush is in line with a national trend as well as bipartisan presidential tradition. Indeed, from the founding of the country, American presidents have had their way with English, for good or ill. I scoured the Oxford English Dictionary, now out as version 3.0 on CD-ROM, and was struck by the many words for which US presidents provide the earliest-known dated evidence.

George Washington referred to his presidential tenure with the word administration, the earliest example given in the O.E.D., dated 1796. Notable, too, is that he did not use government, the already established British term for the elected leadership in power: “In reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional error.”

The O.E.D. also quotes Washington for the earliest examples of such common words as ravine (1781, for “a deep narrow hollow...worn by a torrent”), tin can (1770, though George spelled it Tinn can), tow path (1788, for a path next to a canal; the British term is towing-path), corn row (1769, for “a row of planted corn”) and even Newtown pippin, a variety of apple named for the town on Long Island where it was introduced.

As in other presidential matters, Washington set the tone for his successors. Familiar terms like normalcy (popularized though not coined by Warren Harding), belittle (from Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, 1782) and lunatic fringe (from Theodore Roosevelt’s History as Literature, 1913) are so well established that their presidential roots are a mere etymological footnote.

Harding’s normalcy is perhaps the most successful presidential word. The O.E.D. has it from 1857, but the word did not take flight until Harding used it in a stump speech in his 1920 presidential campaign: “America’s present need is not heroics but healing, not nostrums but normalcy, not revolution but restoration.”

The word Harding might have used, normality, made its debut in 1849, in Edgar Allen Poe’s “Eureka.” But Harding was notoriously ill spoken. He so fractured the language that H.L. Mencken dubbed Harding’s English “Gamalielese,” alluding to Harding’s middle name, Gamaliel. Of Harding’s speech, Mencken wrote, “It reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights.” It is said that when Harding got to the word normality in the course of reading the speech, he misread it as “normalty,” then mispronounced that. Out came normalcy. The press noticed, so Harding repeated it throughout the campaign, which adopted “Return to Normalcy” as its slogan.

I asked Fred Shapiro, editor of the coming Yale Dictionary of Quotations, to check recent data for normalcy vs. normality. From his search of Nexis, the vast newspaper-and-magazine database, for all occurrences of these words in July 2002, the score was normalcy 308, normality 289. Harding’s normalcy not only stuck (and helped win him the presidency), but it now seems to be ousting its senior synonym.

Other everyday terms got a boost from once or future presidents, whether or not presidentially coined. Here’s a rundown, all first examples in the O.E.D.: public relations (Jefferson, 1807), squatter (Madison, 1788), caption (Madison, 1789, in the sense “a heading in text,” used instead of the British terms title or heading), relocate and relocation (Lincoln, 1834 and 1837), point well taken (Lincoln, 1863) and come to stay (Lincoln, 1864, referring to peace: “I hope it will come soon, and come to stay”).

The whole world listens when a president speaks, so we should expect that, in prepared remarks, presidential words are very carefully chosen. In January 1998, President Clinton famously said: “I want you to listen to me. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”

The choice of the term “sexual relations” is a very formal way of putting it; one might have expected something like “I did not have an affair with that woman” or “I did not have sex with that woman.” I turned to Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, a standard authority in American legal practice. There, “sexual relations” is defined as “coitus.” Given the facts of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair as they have generally been reported, Clinton spoke the truth, albeit deceptively.

Did the Clinton White House check its Webster’s Unabridged before the President spoke and script his words in line with its definition, thus sidestepping out-and-out perjury?

This trove of president’s English could go on: bully pulpit (Theodore Roosevelt, 1909), military-industrial complex (Eisenhower, 1961), a thousand points of light (George H.W. Bush, 1988). Listen closely as President George W. Bush, from his bully pulpit, delivers the State of the Union address later this month. But for now, to adopt Truman’s words (1945), the buck stops here.

Frank Abate is a lexicographer and president of Dictionaries International, a consulting and editorial services firm. William Safire is on vacation. Link

Gravitas!

Now they make fun of Bush, but in years to come, he will be touted as the most prolific and inventive neologist, ever! (g)

Check out my post #23. :-)

They also neglect to pont out that "misunderestimate" was said on purpose by Bush, who knew exactly what he was saying.

The word, "OK", comes from an stamp used by a civil war era inspector. His initials were "OK", and when he inspected a product for shipment, he would stamp "OK" on the product, and off it went.