I now get magazines sent to my home rather than my office, which means that I actually read them from time to time.
The latest issue of The Liberal, for instance, contains a fascinating article by Sarah Churchwell about the home-spun language used by Sarah Palin and John McCain during the US presidential election. She demonstrates that the attempt to paint Barack Obama as an out-of-touch metropolitan intellectual failed, but it is a brilliant analysis of how powerful this particular discourse remains in the US culture wars. “The real winner of the 2008 election,” she says, “may yet turn out to have been the English language”.
I was struck by the following passage: “Liberals, associated with over-education, ivory-tower irrelevance and elite effeteness, were understood by extension to indulge in overly theoretical, exclusionary or multisyllabic language, as well as pedantry. Conservatives, by contrast, associated with small-town exurbia, were understood to employ the aw-shucks, down-home, common-sense vernacular of the man on the street.
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