BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

If you like George Lakoff's writings on framing, you'll love "Talking Right." It's Lakoff with Tabasco sauce and wry analysis.

How can you not love a book with the line: "It's hard to think of any leading right-wing broadcaster whom even his most devoted fans would welcome having as a brother-in-law." We would add the individual horror one would experience of having Ann Coulter as a sister-in-law!

Like Lakoff, Geoffrey Nunberg, the author of "Talking Right," is a Bay Area professor who specializes in linguistics. While Lakoff provides the brilliant theoretical context and foundation for how the right wing has "framed" the political language used to control public debates, Nunberg fills in the historical details. And he does it with an ironic eye and keen appreciation for the hypocrisy that is the backside of how the right wing has manipulated the connotations of words, phrases and slogans to their advantage.

"As it happens, the majority of brie consumers are Republicans," Nunberg writes. "But whoever actually buys the stuff, it stands for the Right's stereotype of liberals Ð soft, pale, runny, and French." Remember Rove's successful effort to "Frenchify" John Kerry?

Nunberg's analysis of how the right wing has shifted our entire political discourse is thought provoking throughout. His dissection of how the Republicans have stifled the Democrats from discussing class issues while it is the Republicans who are conducting class warfare is essential reading.

Of course, the Democrats could fight back, but that would take stamina and the ability to stay on message for a very long period of time. It would be helpful if the Dems could get everyone who has an income below $100,000 a year to realize that "when it comes to the crunch, the 'freedom' that conservatives champion for working Americans amounts to no more than the right to take a job and shove it." That is if they can find a job that hasn't been sent overseas.

Indeed, as most BuzzFlash readers know, the very "gravity" of our political language has shifted so far right that a centrist now is what a conservative was in the '60s. The Republican Party leadership now isn't conservative; it's radical, in the truest sense of the word.

"Talking Right" begins by asking, "Are the Democrats simply tone deaf?"

Nunberg hopes that they will awaken with a sense of language that embraces progressive ideals. But they will need a narrative, not just words. They will need a coherent domestic vision and world view.

But Nunberg cautions, "Whatever they [the Democrats] come up with in the way of new and compelling ideas and a new sense of political purpose, they'll have a hard time packaging them so long as the right has its name all over the wrapping paper."

Geoffrey Nunberg is an adjunct full professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information, a researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University, and a consulting professor in the Stanford Department of Linguistics. He is also chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. Since 1989, he has done a language feature on NPR's "Fresh Air," and his commentaries on language and politics are regularly seen in the Sunday New York Times and other publications. A winner of the Linguistic Society of America's Language and the Public Interest Award, he is also the author of The Way We Talk Now and Going Nucular. Nunberg lives in San Francisco.

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS