To Er, Um, Ah, Is To Be Human (ask The Pm, Guys)

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday October 18, 2008

Ruth Wajnryb

WHO'D be a politician? How do they survive the scrutiny? No, I'm not opposed to the fourth estate. I just remember that I never saw John Howard's eyebrows before the cartoonists got to them.

It's not only cartoonists. According to Michael Erard (Um ... : Slips, Stumbles, And Verbal Blunders, And What They Mean, Anchor, 2008), the verbal performance of US presidents is open-game season for language-watchers. Not surprising. People look to language, especially language blunders, for what's revealed. With politicians, where for good historical reasons we're disinclined to believe what they say about themselves, we look to subtext - what is not said but leaks out, betraying the "real" self. We like to believe that the blunder, like the over-imagined Freudian slip, is a dead giveaway.

We want to respect the authority of those who seek or occupy authoritative positions. So-called "powerless" speech is associated with a plethora of features: verbal disfluencies ("um"), false starts, tag questions ("You know what I mean, don't you?"), fillers ("you know"), intensifying adjectives ("so", "really"), vague hedges ("maybe", "sorta") and distancing politenesses ("if you ask me"). Rightly or wrongly, we don't want the um-and-ah person in the seat of maximum power.

Ronald Reagan's language was systematically tracked by British neuropsychologist Brian Butterworth, who compared Reagan's performance in the 1980 and 1984 debates. Apparently, in 1984, Reagan spoke more slowly, with longer pauses, more false starts, more slips and tip-of-the-tongue difficulties, fewer repairs, more "confusional" moments and grammatical mistakes. Supposed harbingers of the coming Alzheimer's. Then again, others cited ample evidence of an enduring quick wit.

Across the Atlantic, someone else was watching Francois Mitterand. Danielle Duez argued against the attractive, if rather facile, division of speech styles into "powerful" and "powerless". She tracked Mitterand's style, both as candidate and as president, and found that the president spoke more "powerlessly" than the candidate. Perhaps, for the same reason, Kevin Rudd sounded more assertive as opposition leader than as prime minister.

And in the early race for the Republican nomination, Senator Joe Biden cruelly defined a Rudy Giuliani sentence as "a noun, a verb and 9/11".

Now, just as word-watchers were starting to lament the imminent departure of the younger Bush, they've been handed Sarah Palin on a platter. The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is in her element, citing Alistair Cooke's term "Frontier Baroque" as the speech style that gets Republican votes. Here, it's termed "Hansonese", a style that pre- and post-dates its referent. I say again - who'd be a politician?

ruth@laraconsultancy.com

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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