The Reaction's Word of the Year: Douchebag

By Michael J.W. Stickings

GIF, short for "graphic interchange format," is the pick of the Oxford American Dictionary, which obviously went for somewhat after-the-fact novelty. Merriam-Webster, going with political relevance, selected capitalism and socialism (even though the whole "socialism" attack is a fabrication of the right). Collins Dictionary, sticking to "the top news stories and trends of the year," picked words on a month-by-month basis, words like "fiscal cliff," which of course isn't one word but two, and Eurogeddon, which is sort of fake. The Oxford English Dictionary looked back at 2012 neologisms to see which ones might stick, new words like "omnishambles" and "flexitarian" (which isn't new; I've been using it to describe my food choices for years). The American Dialect Society will be selecting its pick later this week, and possibilities include "Frankenstorm." There's just no end to the WOTY fun.

At this political blog of ours, though, it would appear that one word emerged this year as our winner, and it's one that played a big role in our election coverage. No, not "hope" or "change." Those are so 2008, and, besides, with President Obama unchallenged in the primaries and running pretty much as a known commodity in the general election, this was a year dominated by the Republicans, specifically, once the detritus was cast aside (Bachmann, Cain, Santorum, Trump, Gingrich, etc.), by Willard Mitt Romney.

And back in January, on the 19th, long before he had the nomination sown up, and with still so much drama to come, we set the tone for the year to come:

-- "Privileged rich douchebag: The Mitt Romney narrative for 2012." 

Yes, douchebag. It was our definition of Romney and it's now our Word of the Year for 2012.

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Push that envelope right out of the box

And think outside the bucket.

By Capt. Fogg

I would never have heard of Lake Superior State University were it not for their annual list of objectionably worn out words or cliché tropes that need to die -- right now. I have to admit that their track record of publishing this somewhat facetious list has impactified their reputation in an awesome  way, enough so that I go looking for it every year.

Of course, my lifelong effort to avoid pop culture makes some of these things new to me although they may be sufficiently old to you and malodorous enough to the list makers at LSSU to warrant the Big Ban. I do agree with most of their choices of course. Guru for instance has not only gone  gangrenous and flyblown and worse, it's also a bit insulting to actual gurus, but YOLO, you only live once, was a total surprise to me, and hearing it once was more than enough. YODO, to you dude -- You Only Die Once -- and if I had my way it would be slow and painful.

Trending was a bit of a surprise until I read that it's being used in a novel way by journalists: those irrepressible word creators -- used not in the sense that a trend line in a graph of literacy rates, for example, is trending downward, (and I think it is) but in the odd sense that something trending is being more frequently noticed and talked about by those same journo-babblers. Becoming trendy, as it were.

Trend that one right into the trash, please. The same dank dumpster that efforting as a pretentious journo-twit replacement for "trying" was tossed into a few years back. Yes, I agree with the UP gurus (damn) that bucket list should kick its own bucket and those Randites using job creators to describe wealthy people should be stuffed into that bucket before kicking it under the bus. I also agree that it's time to push fiscal cliff over the fecal cliff (along with the hack it rode in on), but, all in all, the annual list includes only 12 entries and is really meant to amuse. 

There's a slightly serious side to this, but mostly we're trying to have fun with it,

said university PR director Tom Pink, but I'm a bit more serious than that. I mean I'd like to carry a cricket bat with IMPACT written on it so as to create a serious impact with people who can't get through 12 words without uttering some maggoty metaphorical use of that word. No, I don't want to  kick ass  because that's another item on my own personal enemies list. It's a long list too, including anything one is likely to say in a Starbucks to persuade them to condescend to charge you eight bucks for a cup of coffee. 

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Craziest Republican of the Day: Steve King

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Rep. Steve King of Iowa may or may not be the craziest Republican -- it's undeniable that he's up at the top of the list, but obviously the competition is stiff -- but he leads the pack in our ongoing CRD series.

By my count, it's his seventh appearance as CRD. The previous for were for:

-- Introducing legislation recognizing the "importance of Christmas and the Christian faith";
-- Saying that same-sex marriage is part of "a push for a socialist society" in America;
-- Saying that he "empathized" with the suicide bomber who attacked an IRS office in Texas;
-- Saying that Obama "favors the black person";
-- Saying that there are babies "in garbage cans around this country" that don't receive health care; and
-- Saying that it would be okay to ask people in hospital about their immigration status.

And then there was the time we noted his bigoted idiocy.

**********

So what is it today? Here's HuffPo:

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said Thursday that diversity has never been America's strong suit, so lawmakers should pass his bill to make English the official U.S. language in the name of unifying the nation.

"One of the great things about America is we've been unified by a common language. That common language, of course, is English," King said during a press conference on his bill. "Our language is getting subdivided by some forces of the federal government. It is time to speak with a common voice."

*****

The bill has no chance of becoming law, but it has come under fire from immigration activists who say it would isolate immigrant populations. Others have charged that groups pushing for the bill are racist.

King pushed back on both charges and said his bill is aimed at bringing the country together. After all, he said, diversity has never been America's strong point.

"The argument that diversity is our strength has really never been backed up by logic," King told The Huffington Post. "It's unity is where our strength is. Our Founding Fathers understood that. Modern-day multiculturalists are defying that."

I'm not sure what "logic" has to do with it, but it certainly seems reasonable that a community is stronger when it builds upon the strengths of multiple groups. The right views multiculturalism as divisive, but actually it can be the source of a powerfully inclusive unity, with different "cultures" maintaining their distinctiveness while contributing to a broader understanding of "the nation." The alternative is exclusiveness and bigotry.

Furthermore, how can he say that diversity is not a strength of America. America may not have been terribly diverse at the outset, but its history is essentially a history of the immigration of diverse groups from around the world. Really, what if America had remained purely English? What if it had never benefitted from influxes of Irish and Italians, Chinese and Eastern Europeans? And what of the many contributions of those brought over in chains, the Africans slaves who finally found freedom? If you want to see what America is like without an appreciation for diversity, just consider the treatment of the indigenous peoples at the hands of the white conquerors. Doesn't all this seem... logical?

King and his may or may not be motivated by bigotry, but he is certainly motivated by ignorance and fear. As for me, I happen to believe in America as something other than, as something greater than, a culturally exclusive, and narrow, community. I happen to think that its greatness lies in its expansive ideals, and in the wonderful diversity of Americans who call themselves American, love America, and contribute to America's brilliantly multifaceted identity while also retaining their cultural particularities.

And that includes language. King may want everyone to speak English, and I am not denying that the members of any community need to be able to communicate with one other, but the fact is, English is already the country's de facto official language. There is no need to legislate it. And I would like to think, contra King's cultural narrowness, that America is a large enough nation, and a great enough one, to accept people who speak many different languages, and to expect that its citizens speak not just English but another language or two as well. 

That's the way the world is heading, towards greater integration, distances shortened with travel and technology. You can either accept that and see America as part of a larger international community or you can stick your head up your ass. Steve King, ignorantly longing for the unicultural glory days of the 18th century, has made his choice clear.

Quote of the Day: John McWhorter on Sarah Palin (and her all-American toddler-speak)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

This, it seems to me, is spot on:

Palin is given to meandering phraseology of a kind suggesting someone more commenting on impressions as they enter and leave her head rather than constructing insights about them. Or at least, insights that go beyond the bare-bones essentials of human cognition -- an entity (i.e. something) and a predicate (i.e. something about it).

*****

What truly distinguishes Palin's speech is its utter subjectivity: that is, she speaks very much from the inside of her head, as someone watching the issues from a considerable distance. The there fetish, for instance -- Palin frequently displaces statements with an appended "there," as in "We realize that more and more Americans are starting to see the light there..." But where? Why the distancing gesture? At another time, she referred to Condoleezza Rice trying to "forge that peace." That peace? You mean that peace way over there -- as opposed to the peace that you as Vice-President would have been responsible for forging? She's far, far away from that peace.

*****

This reminds me of toddlers who speak from inside their own experience in a related way: they will come up to you and comment about something said by a neighbor you've never met, or recount to you the plot of an episode of a TV show they have no way of knowing you’ve ever heard of. Palin strings her words together as if she were doing it for herself -- meanings float by, and she translates them into syntax in whatever way works, regardless of how other people making public statements do it.

*****

The modern American typically relates warmly to the use of English to the extent that it summons the oral -- "You betcha," "Yes we can!" -- while passing from indifference to discomfort to the extent that its use leans towards the stringent artifice of written language. As such, Sarah Palin can talk, basically, like a child and be lionized by a robust number of perfectly intelligent people as an avatar of American culture. And linguistically, let's face it: she is.

Ouch. It doesn't exactly say much for American culture -- and the American people -- that it's essentially personified, linguistically, by Sarah Palin.

But something has to explain her ongoing popularity, at least on the right -- which, let's face it, is child-like (and not in a good way, and I don't mean to insult children) -- and this at least partly does.

She's one of you, my American friends. Like it or not.

Doctor Syntax

By Capt. Fogg

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall
The vapors sweep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan

-Tennyson-


Every year at this time I let Doctor Syntax out of the Vicarage and let him raise hell with the way we've ruined the greatest language on Earth: spray painted it like an old abandoned subway car, put it up on blocks and stolen the wheels and made it all but impossible to have an intelligent conversation because, like one of those German Enigma machines, every word seems to change meaning every time it's used.

Every year brings the same references to "language police" because you know it's true and you know we're guilty of polluting the minds of millions with silly, balbative portmanteau words like Ginormous or Sexting, our relentless verbing of nouns like texting and friending and our instant acceptance of every cliche metaphor, metastatic Malapropism, stupid solecism and yes, with every pusillanimous political polemic we pass along.

No, if conservative, liberal, reactionary, fascist, anarchist, Marxist, royalist, and Fascist are all used interchangeably, we might as well stop talking, legislating, voting and adjudicating and take up arms. And we do.

Every year, as our vocabularies atrophy, we make up words or as our overuse of superlatives diminishes them, as our misuse erases them, we have to invent new ones. After all, when your skate board or your X-Box is awesome, you simply can't discuss how you felt when you saw that Hubble picture of some distant nebula, now can you? What happens to the real verb "to befriend" when it's more fashionably idiotic to "friend" someone or worse, toBFF them? It dies quickly of course and any real dictionary these days is a virtual Arlington of fallen words.

There's a college up in Michigan, Lake Superior State University, that's been putting out an annual list of words that need to die for 35 years. I'm afraid the school will die before they have any results to show. In fact if we still have universities in 35 years I have to wonder whether they'll be teaching in Standard English in the way medieval Universities taught in Latin, while business and popular pursuits are conducted in some 'consumerized' argot or vulgate designed to boost sales and befuddle customers while the general population can't read Hemingway, much less Tennyson any more.

No, I'm not the language police. The real language police are the people who tell you you're a racist if you call an Asian tiger or bear an Asiatic tiger or bear -- or that you may never end a sentence with a preposition. No, I just love English and as you know I love wordplay and the inventive use of words. In principle I don't object to such silliness as "chillaxin," the compound of two bits of dialect; chillin' and relaxin' but only in principle and never when used by some underage hipster with a two thousand word vocabulary. I even thought the short lived "not so much" routine was cute for a few moments, but that's the thing: with fish, house guests, metaphors and the Macarena; after three days one notices a smell. At least I do. Maybe it's time you did too.

Yes, I agree that "shovel-ready" is shovel ready for burial; I agree that it's time to stop calling every adviser a Czar. I am sick unto death at the "app app app app" that I hear quacked out at the phone store, butLSSU's 15 words are not enough nor does the list expose the inverted elitism behind our linguistic cacophony. We may have majored in English at the best schools, but in our HowdyDoody hearts we know it's bad to be grown up and embarrassing to sound educated and so we try ever so hard to sound like the baggy pants crowd who know just how the really cool kids talk in the penitentiaries and crack houses. We always fail at it of course, because those kids change their jargon faster than we can.

As I said, I only do this once a year and that's because it's useless, of course. It only lets me vent some excess steam pressure, to rant against the dying of the light. I know that "impact" will ever hence mean affect and effect and influence and inform and not be just a carrion metaphor. I know that those words are gone forever from popular parlance and that this little rant will be as hard for my grandchildren to read as Chaucer. Hell, animated video clips may have replaced the written word altogether by then and the University of Wii may be the new Harvard. I don't know. I do know that no one cares how much of value we lose every day or with what dross we replace it. I do know there are still people who can write well and I'm proud to appear here with them. I do also know It's New Year's Eve again and time for old Syntax and me to drown our sorrows -- metaphorically speaking, of course.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

George W. Bush and the War on English

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Funny, funny Borowitz:

In what he hoped would be the capstone to his eight years as President, George W. Bush today signed an executive order repealing the English language.

Scrawling his name on the official document, Mr. Bush said that in abolishing English he had vanquished his "greaterest enemy."

For Mr. Bush, the executive order represents the realization of a longstanding dream that began in 2001 when he declared an official War on Grammar.

The president followed up that declaration of war in 2003 when he signed an executive order canceling the agreement between nouns and verbs.

Read it all. And enjoy.