Bushonics
The day Lisa Shaw's son Tyler came home from school with tears streaming
down his cheeks, the 34-year-old Crawford, Texas, homemaker knew things had
gone too far. "All of Tyler's varying and sundry friends was making fun of
the way he talked," Shaw says. "I am not a revengeful person, but I couldn't
let this behaviorism slip into acceptability. This is not the way America is
about." Shaw and her son are two of a surprising number of Americans who
speak a form of nonstandard English that linguists have dubbed "Bushonics,"
in honor of the dialect's most famous speaker, President George W. Bush.
The most striking features of Bushonics - tangled syntax, mispronunciations,
run-on sentences, misplaced modifiers, and a wanton disregard for
subject-verb agreement - are generally considered to be "bad" or
"ungrammatical" by linguists and society at large.
But that attitude may be changing. Bushonics speakers, emboldened by the
Bush presidency, are beginning to make their voices heard. Lisa Shaw has
formed a support group for local speakers of the dialect and is demanding
that her son's school offer "a full-blown up apologism." And a growing
number of linguists argue that Bushonics isn't a collection of language
"mistakes" but rather a well-formed linguistic system, with its own lexical,
phonological, and syntactic patterns.
"These people are greatly misunderestimated," says University of Texas
linguistics professor James Bundy, himself a Bushonics speaker. "They're not
lacking in intelligence facilities by any stretch of the mind. They just
have a differinway of speechifying. "
It's difficult to say just how many Bushonics speakers there are in America,
although professor Bundy claims "their numbers are legionary." Many who
speak the dialect are ashamed to utter it in public and will only open up to
a group of fellow speakers. One known hotbed of Bushonics is Crawford, the
tiny central Texas town near the president's 1,600-acre ranch. Other centers
are said to include Austin and Midland, Texas, New Haven, Conn., and
Kennebunkport, Maine.
Bushonics is widely spoken in corporate boardrooms, and has long been
considered a kind of secret language among members of the fraternity Delta
Kappa Epsilon. Bushonics speakers have ascended to top jobs at places like
the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human
Services. By far the greatest concentration of Bushonics speakers is found
in the U.S. military. Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig is only the
most well known Bushonics speaker to serve with distinction in America's
armed forces. Among the military's top brass, the dialect is considered to
be the unofficial language of the Pentagon. Former President George H. W.
Bush spoke a somewhat diluted form of the dialect that bears his family's
name, which may have influenced his choice for vice president, Dan Quayle,
who spoke an Indiana strain of Bushonics.
The impressive list of people who speak the dialect is a frequent topic at
Lisa Shaw's weekly gathering of Bushonics speakers. That so many members of
their linguistic community have risen to positions of power comes as a
comfort to the group, and a source of inspiration. "We feel a good deal less
aloneness, my guess is you would want to call it," Shaw says. "It just goes
to show the living proof that expectations rise above that which is
expected." Some linguists still contend, however, that the term "Bushonics"
is being used as a crutch to excuse poor grammar and sloppy logic.
"I'm sorry, but these people simply don't know how to talk properly," says
Thomas Gayle, speech professor at Stanford University. Professor Gayle was
raised by Bushonic parents, and says he occasionally catches himself lapsing
into the dialect. "When it happens, it can be very misconcerting," Gayle
says. "I understand Bushonics. I was one. But under full analyzation, it's
really just an excuse to stay stupider."
It's talk like that that angers many Bushonics speakers, who say they're
routinely the victims of prejudice. "The attacks on Bushonics demonstrate a
lack of compassion and amount to little more than hate speech," says a
prominent Bushonics leader who spoke on the condition that his quote be
"cleaned up." Increasingly, members of the Bushonics community are fighting
back. Lisa Shaw's Crawford-based group is pressing the local school board to
institute bilingual classes, and to eliminate the study of English grammar
altogether. "It's an orientation of being fairness-based," Shaw says.
A Bushonics group in New England has embarked on an ambitious project to
translate key historical documents into the dialect, beginning with the Bill
of Rights. (For instance, the Second Amendment rendered into Bushonics
reads: "Guns. They're American, for the regulated militia and the people to
bear. Can't take them away for infringement purposes. Not never.") Bushonics
activists say they'll keep fighting as long as there are still children who
come home from school crying because their classmates can't understand a
word they're saying. Lisa Shaw hopes that every American will heed the words
of the nation's No. 1 Bushonics speaker, and vow to be a uniter not a
divider. "We shouldn't be cutting down the pie smaller," Shaw says with
quiet dignity. "We ought to make the pie higher."
299,729,458 metres per second
It's not just a good idea: it's the law.
