I’m pleased to mention again that Slate has indeed finally started providing links to original sources — often streaming video and audio, which is especially useful — when it picks on President Bush’s alleged Bushisms. That happened, I think, a month or two ago, and it continues to be the case.
But the substance of the Bushisms continues to appear often quibbling and sometimes baffling. Here’s today’s:
“We expect the states to show us whether or not we’re achieving simple objectives — like literacy, literacy in math, the ability to read and write.” — on federal education requirements, Washington, D.C., April 28, 2005
What exactly is the problem here? If the joke is that “literacy in math” is wrong, then the error is in the joke, not Bush’s statement; “literacy” is defined to include “The condition or quality of being knowledgeable in a particular subject or field.” I don’t find “literacy in math” to be the most elegant usage, but I don’t think it’s particularly risible, either. A search for “math literacy” suggests that many others agree. My guess is that the President started saying literacy, then realized he wanted to also mention math, so he used the not uncommon concept of “literacy in math” to make clear that he wasn’t just focusing on purely reading-and-writing literacy.
Or maybe the problem is that Bush omitted an “and.” Bush’s statement can just as plausibly be transcribed (given the timing of the pauses, probably more plausibly transcribed) as:
We expect the states to show us whether or not we’re achieving simple objectives, like literacy — literacy in math, the ability to read and write.
Maybe there should have been an “and” between “literacy in math” and “the ability to read and write.”
But even perfectly articulate people often speak more choppily than they’d write; and sometimes even in writing, people omit the conjunction in a list for rhetorical effect (though that usually happens in a list of three or more).
And more broadly, very few people can be relied on being constantly elegant, or even constantly grammatically correct, in extended extemporaneous commentary. I like to think that I’m a pretty articulate user of English, but I’ve shuddered when reading transcripts of what I say. I wager the same is true for many other speakers. What’s funny, insightful, or otherwise valuable about picking on Bush for something like this?
UPDATE: A reader suggests: “I suspect that the ‘joke’ is that Bush listed 3 things: literacy, literacy in math, and literacy, i.e. that he didn’t ‘realize’ that literacy means ‘the ability to read and write’ and so he listed it twice not realizing that he was, and thus the joke is that he doesn’t even know what the word ‘literacy’ means when calling for others to be taught it.” But if that’s a joke, that flows from what is likely a mistranscription of Bush’s statement. Bush has a short pause before “like literacy,” and a long pause after it. The better transcription is thus:
We expect the states to show us whether or not we’re achieving simple objectives, like literacy — literacy in math, the ability to read and write.
Even if I’m wrong that this is the better transcription, it’s at least as good a transcription. And this transcription suggests that Bush was either saying “literacy” and then listing two aspects of literacy, or (at worst) saying a word, losing his train of thought for a moment, and resuming the statement by repeating the word, something that speakers very often do.
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