[Newspoetry] Fwd: Bushonics speakers unitify!! (fwd)

[Sehvilla]

sehvilla

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2001 15:38:08 -0600
From: Althea Loschky <aloschky at uni.uiuc.edu>
To: anlyzstrlz at advancenet.net, asta at advancenet.net
Subject: Fwd: Bushonics speakers unitify!!


>
>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 Bushonics
>speakers 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."