phhhhhhht...and bush's great response.....
Bush's defining moment
WHEN IT comes to work, as, sadly, it so often does, people should do what they're best at. Leave anything else to someone who cares.
For less serious matters, go ahead, mess around with ships in bottles even if you're all thumbs, or growing tomatoes in raised garden beds, as I do, even though my own thumbs could not be less green. No harm done. I occasionally even get a bumper crop.
But the microeconomics nanoeconomics, I guess of our personal areas of expertise demand precision and quality control as we go about the making of our daily widgets.
Which is just to say that, seriously,
President Bush has no business whatsoever weighing in, as I heard him do Tuesday twice, on anything to do with etymology.
Rather brilliantly, during last fall's re-election campaign the president even made a folksy virtue out of his tendency to mangle his mother tongue. He recognized that many folks not most folks elected president, but that's a matter for another day aren't so good with words themselves.
A non-highfalutin' president is just fine with them.
And yet somehow, Bush just couldn't stop himself from playing Oxford English Dictionary at his press conference.
I watched some of the conference at home while getting dressed. At first, it was kind of endearing. I tried to explain the president's parsing to our weekend visitor,
Paul-Antoine Goutal, a young French law student traveling around this country.
"See, he was trying to analyze the word 'scrapping,'' I told him over poached eggs and pain perdu, which Paul, who speaks excellent English himself, was amused to hear we call French toast.
"Ah like that scrap of paper right there,' said Paul.
"Well, yeah, but in this case, the president was using it as a verb meaning 'to get rid of,' as in scrapping a treaty, only he couldn't quite recall if that was a correct idiom, so he kind of jokingly questioned his own use of it to the press to see if ... well, if he was wrong.'
"Your president is not very good with words.'
"No not his strong suit.'
Later in the day, listening to
Warren Olney's show on KCRW-FM, I heard a tape of Bush answering a question in the same news conference about the Amnesty International report on U.S. treatment of prisoners of war in Iraq.
"It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of ... people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble that means not tell the truth,' said the president.
"Oh, my God,' I said to no one at all as I drove solo over Glenarm Street. "Twice with the definitions in one day and this time he so got it wrong.'
What Bush meant to say, of course, was "dissemble' to conceal the truth by pretense. Nice word. But a bit of a 50- cent word, though, one that I would rarely use myself.
The simpler, the better that's my semantic motto. In general, I prefer words of one syllable. So should the president. He should have said what he was no doubt thinking: "People who had been trained to lie.' |
