Subject:
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Americans on the word 'nucular' (was Re: Bush on Nucular Non-proliferation)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 13 Feb 2004 03:05:32 GMT
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Viewed:
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519 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, David Laswell wrote:
> I've heard it said that his choppy speech actually makes him
> more popular. Yeah, sure he gets teased mercilessly by people
> with a well-refined vocabulary, but that's a relatively small
> portion of the US population. The rest are in the same boat
> that he is.
I don't know that I'd tease him mercilessly about it, but it just seems, well,
incongruous (a word I shouldn't be using in chatting with the majority of the
American population perhaps ;-).
Can it be true that its a relatively small proportion of the US population that
can pronounce 'nuclear' correctly? (!) This has not been my experience of
Americans.
> Or, more appropriately, he's in the same boat that they are,
> and knowing that makes him seem more approachable than someone
> who graduated magna cum laude from an ivy league university.
Maybe that's at the heart of my problem. I expect that in order for me to trust
and generally support the decisions of my political leaders, some of which
decisions seem to make little sense on the face of them, I need to believe that
they are more across the material and better able to take the big decisions.
Much as I might rail about Australia's Prime Minister John Howard or his
opposition leader Mark Latham, both of them have my respect on this basis.
Then there's George Bush Jr.
Granted I'm not American, so technically he's not my leader, but what with him
being the self styled leader of the free world, I kinda still feel myself
something of a stakeholder. Previous US Presidents have done stuff that seemed
strange, but many of them still had my repect and general support in their
roles.
> And attacking him on his pronunciation
I wouldn't commend this idea either. I rather envision one of his bright and
capable aids catching him in the corridor, and quietly pointing out that he's
giving away that his understanding of such things is slight.
> can seem like an attack on them as well, so rather than
> reducing his support, it can actually increase it.
>
> Weird, huh?
Extremely weird.
Australia has three tiers of government - local, state, and federal. I guess I
would look for my local councillors to be folks like me, but I would rather hope
that at the state a federal level that the decisionmakers, or at the very least
the leaders, were considerably better than me at the critical tasks of thinking
things through and making decisions. And this despite my having made a career
out of thinking and making decisions.
Mind you, I would certainly expect that even at the local level, a green
candidate might be able to say 'environmentally sustainable development' without
stumbling, a progressive candidate 'social and economic infrastructure', a
nationalist 'competency based immigration' and a nutcase who'd like to build an
nuclear power station in the Southern Highlands 'nuclear'.
Am I really out on a limb here?
Richard
Still baldly going...
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Bush on Nucular Non-proliferation
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| (...) I've heard it said that his choppy speech actually makes him more popular. Yeah, sure he gets teased mercilessly by people with a well-refined vocabulary, but that's a relatively small portion of the US population. The rest are in the same (...) (21 years ago, 12-Feb-04, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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