Forwarded Message:
> Bushonics speakers - strike back! We're mad as hell and we won't be misunderestimated
anymore! 
> 
>   - - - - - - - - - - - - 
> 
>  By Tom McNichol March 19, 2001 Salon.com 
> 
>  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 differing way 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, a 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."



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