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Thank
you for the very enjoyable read.
Now,
please translate this into Lojban, preserving the original humour and
intent.
Cheers,
jml
More
on the decline of English -- perhaps in another sense.
Bushonics speakers strike back
We're mad as hell and we won't be misunderestimated anymore!
- - - - - - - - - - - -
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
Bushonicsspeakers 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."
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