Use Your Words
The verbal gaffes, the mangling of the mother tongue, the malapropisms of our former president have gone down in history as “Dubya speak.” Mat Whitcross in “George Bush’s War on Language,” goes so far as to accuse Bush of ”a calculated use of Orwellian double speak.” Now comes the new president, whose prose style is finding immediate favor with such opinion writers as Stanley Fish in the New York Times (see “Barack Obama’s Prose Style”). According to Fish, “Obama doesn’t deposit us at a location he has in mind from the beginning; he carries us from meditative bead to meditative bead, and invites us to contemplate.” We are asked to “linger over each alliteration, parse each emphasis, tease out each implication.” Quite a contrast to the man who once told high school students, “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.” The dumbed-down days are over. At least for the next four years.