During the State of the Union Address, President Bush said “I want to congratulate the new Democrat majority.” This is grammatically incorrect. Democrat is a noun, Democratic is an adjective. A majority of Democrats is correct usage, but a Democrat majority is not.
But this is something more than another example of George W’s language abuse, his idiomatic Abu Ghraib where words are tortured with whips and dogs. It’s linguistic disingenuousness used by Joe McCarthy, a verbal gimmick intended to imply that Democrats are not necessarily Democratic; that is, that they don’t relate to a broad population. Predictably, Democrats feel that they’ve been undemocratically dissed. They're a bit touchy right now. After all, it's only been a few weeks since CNN and Yahoo! News both confused Barack Obama with Osama Bin Laden.
This lexiconic skirmish does not bode well for bipartisanship. Since George W. has repeatedly requested tax cuts, he should request a repeal of his own syntax.
No comments:
Post a Comment