Dove feathers in the President's mouth etc

[vze422fs at verizon.net]

on 1/29/03 1:30 PM, Paul Nightingale at isread at btopenworld.com wrote:

> American listers might or might not know that here in Britain the Deputy
> Prime Minister is John Prescott. The media get a lot of mileage from
> laughing at the way Prescott 'mangles' the language when he speaks. This
> includes faulty syntax and also his accent. Admittedly, his sentences do
> take on a life of their own at times, but the point seems to be that we
> don't have to take him too seriously. Prescott is an example of a
> working-class trade unionist who became a Labour MP; he used to be
> identified, broadly, with the left-of-centre within Labour. His accent is an
> affront to those who think it signifies no education. Hence he becomes a
> jumped-up oik who doesn't know his place. Had he chosen his parents more
> wisely, he'd no doubt be more worthy of respect.
> 
> To the political elite, and that includes the media, Prescott is an
> outsider. Do Bush's language skills have the same meaning, or even something
> remotely similar, for Americans? Undeniably, Bush did choose his parents
> more wisely than Prescott, but does he lose points for his accent? Is Bush
> perceived as something of an outsider?
> 
Bush's accent, though vaguely Texan, is neither blue-collar nor indicative
of a lack of education. Though he apparently coasted through Yale and
Harvard Business school, this man has had ample opportunities for education.
His mangling of the language appears to be due to flat-out intellectual
laziness. It's not his accent that I find objectionable. Texans do not
rearrange syllables in random order as a matter of course. Lazy and ignorant
people do. Dubya says "nucular" because he doesn't care enough to pronounce
it properly or learn anything about it. He's a chicken hawk disgrace. As for
choosing his parents wisely, I will paraphrase Mike Barnicle. "Great
families degenerate into idiocy in the third generation."