看专栏作家评布什、佩林的语法-Can likable still trump knowledgeable ？

在国内学英文时，相信都在课堂上、课堂下花了不知多少时间和精力在英文语法上。
到了美国才感觉到，一般的美国人说话比较“不讲究”，语法不语法的，意思能表
达清楚了也就可以了。所以，说话也就渐渐地变得比较“随便”，入乡随俗嘛。

第一次在电视上看美国总统辩论时，很为克林顿、老布什总统的口才倾倒，也很欣
赏当时的竞选第三者，Ross Perot的德克萨斯口音与诙谐。政治家自然和商人及一
般人不同，领袖嘛，得有让人佩服的地方。而2000年W布什与戈尔的总统竞选辩论，
以及布什以后的白宫生涯，改变了这种看法，想不到，耶鲁大学法学院毕业的美国
总统，不但头痛“fuzzy math”，而且竟然经常使用“gummy grammar [拙劣的语法
]”，有些话简直成了“经典”，常被引用，象下文中提到的“Is our children
learning?” 恐怕会让国内教初级英文的老师笑掉大牙吧。

现在，又来了个竞选副总统的州长佩林，新闻记者专业毕业，不但对过去8年的历史
头痛，设法避而不谈，其在采访、VP辩论中的表现/表演，更让人捧腹、惊讶。

当年布什获选的一个原因，据说是一些选民认为布什象是“他们”中的一个，可以
随和到在一起喝啤酒。现在，又有人欣赏佩林的风度，说她象是个懂得柴米油盐的
家庭妇女。一个可以与其一起喝啤酒的总统把美国领导到如今的地步，一个可以与
其聊家常的家庭妇女副总统会把美国领导出目前的境地吗？

“We could, following her strenuously folksy debate performance, wonder
when elite became a bad thing in America. Navy Seals are elite, and they
get lots of training so they can swim underwater and invade a foreign country,
but if you’re governing the country that dispatches the Seals, it’s not
O.K. to be elite? Can likable still trump knowledgeable at such a vulnerable
crossroads for the country?”

在电视评论节目中见到过下文作者Maureen Dowd，话语不多，声调不高，但言辞犀
利。不愧是普利策奖的得主。

有时候，得欣赏原文，原汁原味儿，尤其是这种讽刺有加的专栏文章。

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Sarah’s Pompom Palaver,By MAUREEN DOWD,Published: October 4, 2008

I had hoped I was finally done with acting as an interpreter for politicians
whose relationship with the English language was tumultuous.

There’s W.’s gummy grammar, of course, like the classic, “Is our children
learning?” And covering the first Bush White House required doing simultaneous
translation for a president who never met a personal pronoun he liked or a wacky
non sequitur he could resist.

Poppy Bush drew comparisons to Warren G. Harding, whose prose reminded H. L.
Mencken of “a string of wet sponges. ... It is so bad that a sort of grandeur
creeps into it.” When Harding died, E. E. Cummings lamented, “The only man,
woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical
errors is dead.”

Being mush-mouthed helped give the patrician Bushes the common touch. As
Alistair Cooke observed, “Americans seem to be more comfortable with
Republican presidents because they share the common frailty of muddled syntax
and because, when they attempt eloquence, they do tend to spout a kind of
Frontier Baroque.”

Darn right. And that, doggone it, brings us to a shout-out for the latest
virtuoso of Frontier Baroque, bless her heart, the governor of the Last
Frontier. Her reward’s in heaven.

At Sarah Palin’s old church in Wasilla, they spoke in tongues. Maybe that’s
where she picked it up.

Hillary Clinton and John McCain ran against Barack Obama by sneering that their
prose was meatier than The One’s poetry. Sarah’s running against the
Democrat’s highfalutin eloquence by speakin’ in homespun haikus.

We could, following her strenuously folksy debate performance, wonder when
elite became a bad thing in America. Navy Seals are elite, and they get lots of
training so they can swim underwater and invade a foreign country, but if
you’re governing the country that dispatches the Seals, it’s not O.K. to be
elite? Can likable still trump knowledgeable at such a vulnerable crossroads for
the country?

Did Joe Biden have to rhetorically rush over to Home Depot before Sarah could
once more brandish “a little bit of reality from Wasilla Main Street there
brought to Washington, D.C.?”

With her pompom patois and sing-songy jingoism, Palin can bridge contradictory
ideas that lead nowhere: One minute she promises to get “greater oversight”
by government; the next, she lectures: “Government, you know, you’re not
always a solution. In fact, too often you’re the problem.”

Talking at the debate about how she would “positively affect the impacts”
of the climate change for which she’s loath to acknowledge human culpability,
she did a dizzying verbal loop-de-loop: “With the impacts of climate change,
what we can do about that, as governor, I was the first governor to form a
climate change subcabinet to start dealing with the impacts.” That was,
miraculously, richer with content than an answer she gave Katie Couric: “You
know, there are man’s activities that can be contributed to the issues that
we’re dealing with now, with these impacts.”

At another point, she channeled Alicia Silverstone debating in “Clueless,”
asserting, “Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just
too many people in too many parts of our planet.” (Mostly the end-all.)

A political jukebox, she drowned out Biden’s specifics, offering lifestyle as
substance. “In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have
been, you know, all our lives,” she said, making the middle class sound like
it has its own ZIP code, superior to 90210 because “real” rules.

Sometimes, her sentences have a Yoda-like — “When 900 years old you reach,
look as good you will not” — splendor. When she was asked by Couric if
she’d ever negotiated with the Russians, the governor replied that when Putin
“rears his head” he is headed for Alaska. Then she uttered yet another
sentence that defies diagramming: “It is from Alaska that we send those out to
make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia,
because they are right there.”

Reared heads reared themselves again at the debate, when she said that Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac “were starting to really kind of rear the head of
abuse.”

She dangles gerunds, mangles prepositions, randomly exiles nouns and verbs and
also — “also” is her favorite vamping word — uses verbs better left as
nouns, as in, “If Americans so bless us and privilege us with the opportunity
of serving them,” or how she tried to “progress the agenda.”

Poppy Bush dropped personal pronouns and launched straight into verbs because
he was minding his mother’s admonition against “the big I.” Palin, by
contrast, uses a heck of a lot of language to praise herself as a fresh face
with new ideas who has “joined this team that is a team of mavericks.” True
mavericks don’t brand themselves.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/opinion/05dowd.html?em



Maureen Dowd
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Maureen Dowd (born January 14, 1952) is a Washington D.C.-based columnist for
The New York Times.[1][2] She has worked for the Times since 1983, when she
joined as a metropolitan reporter.[1][2] In 1999, she was awarded a Pulitzer
Prize for her series of columns on the Monica Lewinsky scandal.[1][3]
Dowd was born in Washington, D.C.,[1][2] the youngest of five children, where
her father (who was born in County Clare in Ireland) worked as a Washington D.C.
police inspector.[4]

Career
In 1973, Dowd received a B.A. in English from Catholic University in Washington,
D.C.[1][2]She began her career in 1974 as an editorial assistant for the Washington
Star where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan reporter, and feature
writer.[1][2] When the newspaper closed in 1981, she went to work at Time.[1][2]
In 1983, she joined The New York Times, initially as a metropolitan reporter.[1][2]
She began serving as correspondent in The TimesWashington bureau in 1986.[1][2]
In 1991, Dowd received a Breakthrough Award from Columbia University.[2] In
1992, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for national reporting,[2] and in 1994 she won
a Matrix Award from New York Women in Communications.[2][5]

In 1995, Dowd became a columnist on The New York Times Op-Ed page[1][2],
replacing Anna Quindlen,[4] who left to become a full-time novelist.[6] Dowd was
named a Woman of the Year by Glamour magazine in 1996.[2] She was the winner of
the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary.[1] In 2000, she won The
Damon Runyon Award for outstanding contributions to journalism.[7] In 2005, she
was the first Mary Alice Davis Lectureship speaker sponsored by the School of
Journalism and the Center for American History at The University of Texas at
Austin.[8]

Writing style
Dowd's columns are distinguished by an acerbic, often polemical writing style.
Her columns often display a critical and irreverent attitude towards powerful figures
such as President George W. Bush, former President Bill Clinton, and Pope Benedict
XVI. Dowd sometimes refers to Bush as "Bubble-Boy" or simply "W." Vice President
Dick Cheney is known by a variety of monikers, including "Vice", "Darth", "Shooter",
"Tricky Dick Deuce", "Dr. No" and "Big Time."[9] Former Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld she routinely calls "Rummy," although this is actually a nickname used by his
long-time close personal friends. "Wolfie" however, is not an actual nickname used by
the friends of Paul D. Wolfowitz. President George H. W. Bush, whom she covered
as Times White House Correspondent, is known as "41," "Daddy" or "Poppy Bush."
More recent targets of Dowd's derision include former CIA Director George Tenet,
known as "Slam," or "Slam-dunk" and Cheney's chief of  staff after the resignation
and indictment of Scooter Libby, David Addington, who is commonly referred to as
"the Black Adder." In a not-so-veiled swipe at Katie Couric[citation needed], Dowd
frequently refers to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as "I'm-a-Dinner-Jacket."

Her use of many such nicknames has prompted some to parody the concept of her
own book, Bushworld, by saying that it is really "Dowdworld - Enter at Your
Own Risk."[10] Another frequent Dowd motif is to catalog the popular culture
influences of the public figures she profiles in her columns.[11].
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maureen_Dowd