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As both a registered Republican and a student of our Official Language, I feel compelled by my sense of public duty to explain certain details of the Grand Old Patois.
The dialect is usually spoken at country clubs and corporate boardrooms. But the electoral process requires that, at four-year intervals, we peons get to see characters on TV who talk Republican as they read their scripts.
In its general syntax, Republican follows Official English with rare exceptions. Most notable of these is its refusal to employ the traditional adjectival form for the other party's name. Observe these examples:
Bad: The Democratic Party
Acceptable: The Democrat Party
Presidential: The Other Side
Excellent: We have a two-party system -- Democrats
and Americans.
But it is in its diction and semantics -- the selection of words and the meanings assigned to those words -- that Republican can be most confusing to the novice. Here are some definitions to help you translate from Republican to Official English:
Special Interest Group. This does not mean the Federal Timber Purchasers Association, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Medical Association, the Milk Producers of America or similar benevolent organizations dedicated to the public interest, as evidenced by their PAC contributions.
It instead refers to women, children, working people, unemployed people, people who want to breath clean air, citizens who weren't born rich and white, and similar grasping, greedy, selfish lobbies.
Soft on Crime. This applies to a bleeding-heart who questions the need for a sentence of life at hard labor for a hemp farmer.
Many other acts which might at first appear to be crimes -- deliberately lying, subverting the Constitution, raiding the public treasury, operating a dangerous workplace -- are, in the Republican dialect, known as campaigning, foreign policy, domestic policy and business as usual.
Get Government off Our Backs. This should be taken quite literally.
Government remains in your pockets -- Reagan and Bush signed the largest and second-largest tax bills in history. And in your bloodstream and urine, where the federal government may now require your employer to conduct controlled-substance tests, on pain of losing federal business. And in your bedroom, where the Republican Supreme Court has upheld state laws forbidding certain private sexual practices. And in a woman's womb, if the Republican platform becomes reality.
But it's not on your back.
Beltway Insider or Entrenched Incumbent: A person of the Democrat persuasion who has held office in Washington for a considerable period of time.
A Republican in similar circumstances merits a different
locution, as with Ronald Reagan's description of George
Bush as a man who has devoted most of his adult life to
the service of his country.
Space prevents me from continuing. But with this start, you shouldn't have much trouble figuring out the real meanings of such Republican phrases as Traditional Values, Family Values, Traditional Family Values, Strong National Defense and Cultural Elite.
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