Do you W or Dubya -

Ok . A kind of follow on from the Palin 'Verbage' track of thought. I was reading the Vanity Fair Online daily gossip - it pointed me to this ABC blog about how Sarah's statements about the 'Troopershed' scandal are straightforward lies. One of the comments at the bottom talks about the letter 'W' in relation to the Republican party. Well this is pretty funny as 'W' has become synonymous with the George W. Bush administration because 'W' is what differenciates George's name from his father, former President Bush. " The letter has become such a popular symbol it's now a word in its own right. The urban dictionary (irritatingly on the button for linguistic development) has an entry for 'dubya' which is meant to be the phonetic spelling of 'W' pronounced in a Texan (the state of Bush) accent. This is what entry 7 of the urban dictionary defines 'dubya' as  - 'If the 23rd letter of the alphabet is "dubya", you might be a redneck.'

The iconic statement of 'W' during the Bush presidency was even endorsed by the election campaign back in '04. Again I'm going to accompany this with an image from the New York Historical Society. This is a campaign hankie. And as you can see, it only uses 'W'. Spelling out the man's full name is no longer deemed necessary. He is simply 'W', or 'dubya'. So I suppose 'W' is positive and 'dubya' is negative. This is reinforced by the context of use: DubyaSpeak.com  for example is a website that claims 'We record the damage'. 

It is ironic that 'talking proper' is historically considered a bastilion of conservative values,  but is now what the republicans use to critique 'overly intellectual' democrats. George W. Bush, like Sarah Palin is reinventing American semantics. Their distinct lexiographic style only reinforces how the political weight of phraseology plays such a big part in this election. But what I'm saying is nothing new. Roman Jacobson's theory of communicative functions famously applied to 'I like Ike'. It's the best example of why 'Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics' remains a jolly worthwhile read.