Staying the Course

It has felt like the president and his cohorts have taken every opportunity to bend, twist, fold, mutilate and generally mess with the language we all share. They have used it to attack those who legitimately disagree with them and to support those of their allies who actions had no justification.

But finally, abusing language and insisting on acting like we are a country of idiots is backfiring.

In an op-ed this morning. George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley hits the nail on the head in his essay entitled, Staying the Course Right Over a Cliff.

THE Bush administration has finally been caught in its own language trap.

“That is not a stay-the-course policy,” Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, declared on Monday.

The first rule of using negatives is that negating a frame activates the frame. If you tell someone not to think of an elephant, he’ll think of an elephant. When Richard Nixon said, “I am not a crook” during Watergate, the nation thought of him as a crook.

“Listen, we’ve never been stay the course, George,” President Bush told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News a day earlier. Saying that just reminds us of all the times he said “stay the course.”

What the president is discovering is that it’s not so easy to rewrite linguistic history. The laws of language are hard to defy.

The whole essay is well worth the time to read. Click here to read it all. You may have to register with the NY Times Online but its worth, I think!

The Meaning of Friendship

I've had the opportunity to ponder the meaning of friendship in the last few months. I won't go into all the gory details but in broad strokes, it is very interesting to discover who is willing to take your back when the chips are down. The results are surprising and uneven, but it sure is a great argument for investing in a lot of friends.

During my morning perusal of Web, I came across this article by Lore Sjöberg, a columnist for Wired. After much resistance, he decided to set up a MySpace account. Here is the link to the article.

The article is funny, but I found this paragraph especially poignant:

"Clicking through, I find I already have a friend named Tom. He works for MySpace and he's willing to answer questions as long as I've read the FAQ first. I can't say that I know what makes someone a true friend, but I'd say one of the major qualifications is that they're willing to answer questions without making you read a FAQ."

So, I get to spend the rest of the day working with friends! It's true. And I wouldn't have it any other way.