Thursday, January 22, 2004

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Department of Sub-Optimal Locutions

I was thinking that I maybe shouldn't have referred to the President as the "Weasle-in-Chief"...

Neither of you, revered readers, complained about it, but I think it's probably a bad thing to do. Why? Well, not because it's inaccurate, but rather because (1) rhetoric like that tends to polarize, which is bad, and (2) the office itself, as distinguished from the person who holds it, deserves a certain degree of respect, and it may be that that kind of name-calling disrespects the office. I've never been able to understand those issues very clearly, but perhaps better to err on the side of caution in this case. I'm not sure. (Incidentally, I started thinking about these issues because of something someone said in an episode of The West Wing I saw once.)

Though now that I think of it, the more respect the office deserves, the more despicable it is for someone who occupies that office to bullshit us with linguistic abominations like "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities." Or to bullshit us at all, for that matter.

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