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April 25, 2006GLOBALISTBush Scores His Points as He Mangles English
By ROGER COHENNEW YORK
President George W. Bush has a reputation — strongest in Europe and in those parts of the United States that most resemble Europe — for mangling the English language. At times, he's earned it.
Here, for example, is Bush at the signing in 2004 of a $417 billion defense-spending bill: "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
Good to know.
Or, a year earlier, on the cherished subject of liberty: "See, free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don't attack each other. Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction."
Unless, of course, they're for use at Hiroshima.
You will note above Bush's use of "See" at the beginning of a sentence, a folksy way of gliding into an idea. Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, says this deployment of "See" is in vogue among Republicans as a way of "clueing in a group in the know."
The targeted group consists of the conservative red-state Bush supporters who see liberals, in Nunberg's words, as a "latte- drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood loving, left-wing freak show."
See, values are central to American politics — they decided the last election — and such small verbal signals are important. Even Bush's linguistic gaffes can go down well: Only East Coast eggheads and the anti-death- penalty Massachusetts crowd speak posh, after all.
Bush's late-life political ascension had much to do with his remarkable ability to parlay a blue-blooded, affluent background into the image of a regular guy. An average dude with lots of cash and Kennebunkport connections goes far.
But even regular guys must learn how to talk in public when they get the biggest job in the world. Bush has become a much better speaker over the past five years. His pacing is better, his ideas clearer. Still, he continues to have his quirks.
One that bothers me is the president's penchant for a little word: "Yet." He loves that particle.
Of course, nobody can have anything against "yet" as a temporal adverb, as in "I haven't found love yet." But that's not the nature of Bush's yet fetish (call it a "yetish"). He adores "yet" as an introductory conjunction, as in:
"Democracies in the Middle East will not look like our own, because they will reflect the traditions of their own citizens. Yet liberty is the future of every nation in the Middle East."
Those two sentences are from the last State of the Union address, in which Bush used "yet" in this way 10 times. For example: "The only alternative to American leadership is a dramatically more dangerous and anxious world. Yet we also choose to lead because it is a privilege to serve the values that gave us birth."
Or: "America is a great force for freedom and prosperity. Yet our greatness is not measured in power or luxuries, but by who we are and how we treat each other."
And, from his swearing-in speech last year: "We have known divisions, which must be healed to move forward in great purposes — and I will strive in good faith to heal them. Yet those divisions do not define America."
I could go on, but you get the idea. Bush likes this odd, archaic-sounding, lofty use of "yet." I called Erin Healey, a White House spokeswoman, three times to try to find out why. Yet the White House did not respond.
So I put the question to Nunberg. His response was that the habit probably reflected one of the most inane but persistent of grammatical myths: that sentences should not begin with "But."
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage describes that notion as "folklore." Fowler's Modern English Usage calls the idea that "but" is misplaced at the start of a sentence an "ungrammatical piece of nonsense."
No matter. When Nunberg writes sentences beginning with "but" he gets mail objecting. Perhaps Bush is just trying to steer clear of that trouble. But I suspect something deeper may be at work.
"Yet" has a faintly biblical echo. From Ecclesiastes: "All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full." Or from Peter: "As servants of God, live as free people, yet do not use your freedom as a pretext for evil." Or from Deuteronomy: "Yet of those that chew the cud or have the hoof cloven you shall not eat these."
The lilt of these sentences is one Bush often echoes. "Yet rights must be more than the grudging concessions of dictators," he said in the 2005 swearing-in speech.
Deconstruction is not a red-state thing. Still, conservative America knows how important it is to pass messages through language to supporters. "People of faith" — an _expression_ favored in the Bush White House to refer to evangelicals — pick up on such things, even at a subliminal level. Liberal wimps naturally do not.
Of course, secular Europeans tend to hate Bush even more for claiming divine guidance than for his verbal awkwardness. Bush will not change his relationship with God. But he's an admirer of Abraham Lincoln and might consider the 1863 Gettysburg Address before piling on those lilting "yets" in his next speech.
Its sixth sentence reads: "But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground."
Lincoln knew his grammar.
And he knew what makes great unifying oratory, as opposed to partisan message-passing. Here are the first two sentences of that brief speech: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."
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