Mother Jones' blog has a fascinating discussion of the grammar (yes, I know, but it's interesting even if you WEREN't a geek who loved, as I did, to diagram sentences in 8th grade) of the conservative movement:
Over on the always interesting if often arcane Language Log, linguist Geoff Nunberg reveals another weapon in conservatives' linguistic arsenal: the object+present participle compound. Those are syntactic constructions like "tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking", which make for handily efficient epithets. He writes: "In fact you could trace the whole history of the right's campaigns against liberals via those compounds -- from tree-hugging and NPR-listening back through the Nixon era's pot-smoking, bra-burning, draft-dodging, and America-hating, until you finally excavate the crude origins of the trope in nigger-loving, the ur-denunciation of white liberal sentimentality."
1 comment:
They're quite fond of gerunds in general, and they like using sentence fragments beginning with the present participle as slogans (eg. "Moving America Forward").
There's also this odd thing where they have dissociated tropes from their literal meanings and inject them with whatever meanings they find semiotically correct at the moment, which I think explains the persistence of "hippie" and "Commie" on the right.
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