09.12.08

Alice Through the Laughing Gas

Posted in language misuse, word misuse at 4:15 pm by Bill Brohaugh

The McCain campaign has become a political persnickitor—a shocked-a-minute bewailer of language abuse, fueled with a creative cynicism that would make Lewis Carroll proud. Oh you bad English speaker! You are a sexist by using the phrase “lipstick on a pig”! And like many shocked persnickitors, McCain is wrong. McCain’s forehead vein is publically popping because of something Barack Obama said:

“John McCain says he’s about change too, and so I guess his whole angle is, ‘Watch out George Bush — except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics — we’re really going to shake things up in Washington,’” he said. “That’s not change. That’s just calling something the same thing something different. You know you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. You know you can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, it’s still going to stink after eight years. We’ve had enough of the same old thing.”

And, welllllllllll OF COURSE, the aforementioned pig must be Sarah Palin, because, after all, there are no male pigs. But Obama has not mentioned her. Obama has not even applied the phrase to a human being. He’s applied it to an activity, which is how this phrase is used most often. I contend that the sexist is the McCain campaign, who hears the word pig and automatically assumes (or, certainly more accurately, pretends to assume) that the pig is Palin. In that way, they are revealing themselves as the sexists.

That’s looking at the issue from the standpoint of political nonsense. Now let’s look at it from language nonsense. “Putting lipstick on a pig” has been around for decades, an idiom communicating the futuile attempt to put a pretty face on an ugly situation. This is known, professional political persnickitors, as analogy. The McCain campaign obviously doesn’t care about the phrase’s history, use, or intent—even though Mr. McCain has apparently used the phrase himself. Mr. Carroll wrote about words and not phrases in the following, but I believe it applies.

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,’ it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.’

When one wants to be master (in this case, of the most powerful nation of the world), willing to twist situations by injecting his politically expedient meanings and implications into observations he doesn’t want to hear and meanings into established English phrases he doesn’t want to respect . . . well, there’s that wall that Humpty sat on. For a while.

McCain’s attempts to manipulate language is putting pig on a lipstick.

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