[lg policy] President sends Americans to the dictionary

[Dennis Baron]

There's a new post on the Web of Language:

President sends Americans to the dictionary

Earlier this week, Pres. Barack Obama sent Americans running to the dictionary when he called Democrats opposing his compromise on tax cuts “sanctimonious.”

At a Dec. 7 press conference, the president accused Republicans of holding middle-class tax cuts hostage and scolded those Democrats taking an uncompromisingly “purist” position against the tax-cut extension: it allows us to “feel good about ourselves and sanctimonious about how pure our intentions are,” but in the end it prevents us from getting anything done.

After the president spoke, Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary reported a spike in look-ups for sanctimonious.

Americans are used to consulting their dictionaries to confirm that when politicians say words like refudiate and misunderestimate they aren’t really words, or at least they won’t be found in dictionaries. But whatever you think of the tax cuts, it’s refreshing—and not just refreshing for lexicographers—when a president talks policy and gives a vocabulary lesson at the same time.

read the rest of this post on the Web of Language:  http://bit/ly/weblan

____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English                    
University of Illinois 
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801                                               

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

http://www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron

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http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage








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