Liberal Linguistics

If my mom had yesterday asked me "what did you learn in school today?" I would have had a very simple answer: Liberals' linguistics are lame.

That's what I learned in linguistics class. Either the democrats are too proud to not take the "linguistic high road," or they just don't realize what a huge difference linguistics make in politics. Seriously, the conservatives have their Frank Luntz, a marvelous linguist, and as a result have made some remarkable headway. For instance, take the "death tax." It used to be called the "estate tax." Essentially what it did was tax people who inherited estates worth a certain amount or more. Obviously, rich conservatives wanted it repealed, so Luntz renamed it the "death tax," so that people would be all like "oh no, I don't want to be taxed when I die!" and he left out the part about how it pretty much only affected the top 2% of the populace. Here's the moral of the story:

If democrats took
The linguistic low road, they'd
Be much better off

Another instance of linguistic engineering (or semantic engineering, as it's called), is that Rush Limbaugh calls liberals "libs." You'd think it wouldn't be too hard for someone in the democratic party (here's looking at you, Keith) to start calling conservatives "cons." Seems like the logical thing to do. You'd think that words don't matter that much- but in all honesty words make a world of difference. Even the word "liberal" is a perfect example of this engineering. In the 50s, being liberal was something that all politicians aspired to be. However, because of smart campaigning, the word has undergone significant pejoration (decline of the connotation words give) and has become almost an insult of sorts.

If you want to learn more about this, Geoffrey Nunberg has an interesting book called 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.