polling sample: "Democrat party"

[Jonathan Lighter]

And what makes it so cool is you can deny it's an insult.

  Heh heh.

  JL

RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: RonButters at AOL.COM
Subject: polling sample: "Democrat party"
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Of course it depends on what you mean by "Democrat," i.e., what kind of
survey methodology you use. If you poll all the delegates to the upcoming
convention, you are surely wrong. If you poll all the Democrats who have ever been
elected to public office, you are surely wrong. If you poll all the Democrats
who attended to all of the 2008 state conventions, you are surely wrong. Even if
you poll all the Americans who are registered Democrats in their states, you
are surely wrong. A true Democrat who has spent any time at all watching
current events would surely know that "Democrat Party" is a deliberate insult used
almost totally by political hacks playing childish morphological games.

Maybe if you poll a few 18-year-old Obama supporters at Central Florida
University you might find some who are unaware of the status of the deletion of the
{-ic} morpheme before the word "Party."

The point is this: anybody who considers herself a Democrat is not going to
be receptive to a term that is a deliberate insult. It is common knowledge that
"Democrat Party" is a derogatory usage. Ergo, ...


In a message dated 6/2/08 8:01:46 AM, db.list at PMPKN.NET writes:


> In any event, though, i still sincerely doubt that the vast majority of
> Democrats actually care either way whether the party is called the
> Democrat or the Democratic Party.
>




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