Ic-k

One of life’s simple pleasures is learning. One of my own favorite pastimes is coming to understand an interesting fact or two from a field in which I have no trained experience at all. So I enjoyed reading Roger Shuy’s post, “-ic,” on Language Log this evening.

Professor Shuy, a linguistics researcher, here takes up President Bush’s much-noticed slip during his State of the Union address, referring to to the Democrats as the “Democrat Party.” Nearly anyone who follows American politics recognizes the pejorative connotation that term carries in political debate, so many in the media were caught off-guard that the President would squeeze such a jibe into such a major speech.

As a fairly passive observer of Washington’s daily grind, I wasn’t surprised to see that Bush tried to wiggle his way out of questions about his word choice Monday on NPR. “I’m not that good at pronouncing words anyway,” the president demurred. Well, he’s got me there, I thought. I pretty much expected that would be the end of it.

Of course, that’s only because I am not a crafty linguist. Roger Shuys, on the other hand, would have none of Bush’s linguification. He took the president at his word, and looked at other instances of the “-ic” phoneme in his address.

economic reformpublic schools

basic private health insurance plan

basic health care insurance

domestic oil production

Strategic Petroleum Research

Atlantic Ocean

public servants

horrific scale

democratic legislature (of Afghanistan)

democratic constitution (of Afghanistan)

tragic escalation

democratic Iraq

diplomatic strategy

democratic Palestine

Each one pronounced as good as a Connecticut yankee, of course. After running the same test on Bush’s speech patterns in an earlier year, Shuy pokes a conclusive hole in the president’s excuse.

I’ll add another favorite experience to my earlier statement: I love seeing (and I use Harry Frankfurt’s exacting definition here) bullshit called for bullshit. It’s even more heartening to see a tight argument constructed that throws that bullshit out the window. If the whole thing is written so well that I can find it after a ten-hour day and unwind while reading it, well, that’s a feat. If only the world had a few more champion callers-out like Roger Shuy, I might have a lot more good reads.