Hi, thames... speaking of salon. I posted this on the GWB thread, too:
By Tom McNichol
March 19, 2001 | The day Lisa Shaw's son Tyler came home
from school with tears streaming down his cheeks, the
34-year-old Crawford, Texas, homemaker, knew things had
gone too far.
"All of Tyler's varying and sundry friends was making fun of the
way he talked," Shaw says. "I am not a revengeful person, but
I couldn't let this behaviorism slip into acceptability. This is not
the way America is about."
Shaw and her son are two of a surprising
number of Americans who speak a form of
nonstandard English that linguists have
dubbed "Bushonics," in honor of the dialect's
most famous speaker, President George W.
Bush. The most striking features of
Bushonics -- tangled syntax,
mispronunciations, run-on sentences, misplaced modifiers and
a wanton disregard for subject-verb agreement -- are generally
considered to be "bad" or "ungrammatical" by linguists and
society at large.
But that attitude may be changing. Bushonics speakers,
emboldened by the Bush presidency, are beginning to make
their voices heard. Lisa Shaw has formed a support group for
local speakers of the dialect and is demanding that her son's
school offer "a full-blown up apologism." And a growing
number of linguists argue that Bushonics isn't a collection of
language "mistakes" but rather a well-formed linguistic system,
with its own lexical, phonological and syntactic patterns.
"These people are greatly misunderestimated," says University
of Texas linguistics professor James Bundy, himself a
Bushonics speaker. "They're not lacking in intelligence facilities
by any stretch of the mind. They just have a differing way of
speechifying."
It's difficult to say just how many Bushonics speakers there are
in America, although professor Bundy claims "their numbers
are legionary." Many who speak the dialect are ashamed to
utter it in public and will only open up to a group of fellow
speakers. One known hotbed of Bushonics is Crawford, the
tiny central Texas town near the president's 1,600-acre ranch.
Other centers are said to include Austin and Midland, Texas,
New Haven, Conn., and Kennebunkport, Maine.
Bushonics is widely spoken in corporate boardrooms, and has
long been considered a kind of secret language among
members of the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon. Bushonics
speakers have ascended to top jobs at places like the Internal
Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human
Services. By far the greatest concentration of Bushonics
speakers is found in the U.S. military. Former Secretary of
State Alexander Haig is only the most well known Bushonics
speaker to serve with distinction in America's armed forces.
Among the military's top brass, the dialect is considered to be
the unofficial language of the Pentagon.
Former President George H.W. Bush spoke a somewhat
diluted form of the dialect that bears his family's name, which
may have influenced his choice for vice president, Dan Quayle,
who spoke an Indiana strain of Bushonics.
The impressive list of people who speak the dialect is a
frequent topic at Lisa Shaw's weekly gathering of Bushonics
speakers. That so many members of their linguistic community
have risen to positions of power comes as a comfort to the
group, and a source of inspiration.
"We feel a good deal less aloneness, my guess is you would
want to call it," Shaw says. "It just goes to show the living
proof that expectations rise above that which is expected."
Some linguists still contend, however, that the term "Bushonics"
is being used as a crutch to excuse poor grammar and sloppy
logic.
"I'm sorry, but these people simply don't know how to talk
properly," says Thomas Gayle, a speech professor at Stanford
University. Professor Gayle was raised by Bushonic parents,
and says he occasionally catches himself lapsing into the
dialect.
"When it happens, it can be very misconcerting," Gayle says. "I
understand Bushonics. I was one. But under full analyzation, it's
really just an excuse to stay stupider."
It's talk like that that angers many Bushonics speakers, who
say they're routinely the victims of prejudice.
"The attacks on Bushonics demonstrate a lack of compassion
and amount to little more than hate speech," says a prominent
Bushonics leader who spoke on the condition that his quote be
"cleaned up."
Increasingly, members of the Bushonics community are fighting
back. Lisa Shaw's Crawford-based group is pressing the local
school board to institute bilingual classes, and to eliminate the
study of English grammar altogether. "It's an orientation of
being fairness-based," Shaw says. A Bushonics group in New
England has embarked on an ambitious project to translate key
historical documents into the dialect, beginning with the Bill of
Rights. (For instance, the Second Amendment rendered into
Bushonics reads: "Guns. They're American, for the regulated
militia and the people to bear. Can't take them away for
infringement purposes. Not never.")
Bushonics activists say they'll keep fighting as long as there are
still children who come home from school crying because their
classmates can't understand a word they're saying. Lisa Shaw
hopes that every American will heed the words of the nation's
No. 1 Bushonics speaker, and vow to be a uniter, not a
divider.
"We shouldn't be cutting down the pie smaller," Shaw says with
quiet dignity. "We ought to make the pie higher."
salon.com |
