Subject: RE: [lojban] Fwd: "Bushonics"

From: Jonathan Lange <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 18:41:16 +1000

charset="iso-8859-1"

Thank you for the very enjoyable read.

Now, please translate this into Lojban, preserving the original humour and
intent.

Cheers,
jml

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Monday, 21 May 2001 6:34 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: [lojban] Fwd: "Bushonics" 

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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