Monday, October 23, 2006

Press: A few liberal words on the meaning of words

"We're all pretty liberal — at least if you're using the word as historically defined. It's hard to imagine even Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter coming out in favor of racial segregation, child labor or male-only workplaces. To the degree the word no longer evokes the fight against those things and connotes moral squishiness and effete elitism instead, Republicans have been successful in deconstructing it, making it unusable.

If you're a word person, you watch this with a sense of appalled wonder and ask: Is anybody else seeing this?

Geoffrey Nunberg is. He's a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism Into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show."

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