WILLIAM SAFIRE'S "ON LANGUAGE"
Getting it Right: 'Hell' is undergoing reheckification

For shame: two posts in two days inspired by conservative essays. How's that for bipartisanship? At any rate, this is from William Safire's whimsical column about the English language; usually, the former Nixon administration speechwriter stays away from ideology when writing these essays.

From the New York Times via the Houston Chronicle:

Language mavens, however, will focus on the president's repeated use of the euphemism heck. Revisiting the scene of Hurricane Katrina's devastation in January, he sought to help regenerate the New Orleans tourism industry by recommending the city as "a heck of a place to bring your family." The Washington Post editorially sniffed at the way he was "deploying the same infamous turn of phrase." The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Eugene Kane warned viewers of the State of the Union address, "If Bush uses 'darn' or 'heck' as an adjective to describe a person, place or thing, have a drink. If he uses heck or darn more than once ... that means he's in his folksy mode."

We have a language anomaly here: The euphemism is taken to be offensive, while the harsh word being avoided — in Bush's case, and with apologies to the sensitive or reverent reader, hell — is presumably more acceptable.

Click here for the rest.

I did imply a couple of days ago that I love dirty words. Same thing with euphemisms.

I totally agree with Safire's implication; Bush can say "heck" and "darn" whenever the hell he wants to, damn it. What does it matter, even if the evil one is pandering to his fundamentalist base by doing so? The real words, "hell" and "damn," have become so commonplace that they've lost a great deal of their original punch, so much so that euphemizing them is no longer really all that necessary. Consequently, these old-school substitutes take on new meaning. That is, they have become colloquial, and therefore more "of the people." At the same time, they come in quite handy as far as severity of meaning is concerned. And that's exactly how I use them here at Real Art. Sometimes "damn" or "hell" is exactly what I mean, and so I say it. Other times, I'm feeling more down-to-earth, or don't want to hit it so hard. "Heck" and "darn" are just as good as their evil cousins, and it's pretty unfair to bash Bush for using them.

Really, snide remarks about his use of folksy language only serve to lessen the impact of real criticisms of our boy-king. That is so like the mainstream press: ignore the real issues and attack the inconsequential.

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