It's been a long October for President Barack Obama. In a recent press conference defending the efficacy of Affordable Care Act in spite of its malfunctioning website, he said: "No one's madder than me about the fact that the website isn't working as well as it should. It's going to get fixed."
The backlash was immediate: "madder", the Twitterati complained, "is not a word".
"No one is madder than me about the fact that the website isn't working as well as it should ... It's going to get fixed." —President Obama
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 21, 2013
My dictionary colleagues and I were gobsmacked. "Madder" is, of course, a word: it's the comparative form of "mad". The criticism quickly turned political: "Obama used the term 'madder' instead of 'more mad' & now I know why our educational system is in the [redacted]", one Twitter user sneered.
In America, we hold our leaders to an impossible standard: grandiloquent but not alienating; homespun but not hayseed; correct without being patronizing; familiar without being idiotic. They need, in short, to be masters of register.
"Register" is linguist-speak for the different types of language that a speaker uses in a variety of contexts. Slang is a type of language that marks an informal register; literary words (like "thou" and "shalt") mark a formal register. It's not a matter of grammar, of "correct" and "incorrect", but one of context. And if our presidents can't navigate it seamlessly, we hold it against them.
President Warren G Harding had a rough go of it, constantly accused of and mocked for his apparent linguistic snobbery. His campaign slogan of 1920, "A Return to Normalcy", was a gift to political satirists of the day. He was painted as out of touch, or touched in the head, and he was eventually forced to clarify his meaning in the New York Times:
I have noticed that the word caused considerable newspaper editors to change it to 'normality', he said. "I have looked for 'normality' in my dictionary and I do not find it there. 'Normalcy', however, I did find, and it is a good word.
Good word or not, it was instantly politicized. The Dickensianly named Samuel Gompers complained that "Senator Harding does not use the word 'normal'. He speaks of 'normalcy'. The word is obsolete, and so is the condition to which he would return". And the Daily Chronicle of London kept the embers warm by sneering, in April of 1921, "Mr. Harding is accustomed to take desperate ventures in the coinage of new words."
Poor Warren G Harding: "normalcy" had been in use (albeit in specialized contexts) from 1857, as had all other words he was accused of having coined in equal parts idiocy and elitism. But his legacy was quickly established. "His mind was vague and fuzzy", Frederick Allen writes in 1931:
Its quality was revealed in the clogged style of his public addresses, in his choice of turgid and maladroit language ("non-involvement" in European affairs, "adhesion" to a treaty), and in his frequent attacks of suffix trouble ("normalcy" for normality, "betrothement" for betrothal).
Of course, more is made of the other end of the register spectrum: the informal foibles. George W Bush will never live down "is our children learning?", though the enduring linguistic legacy of his presidency is his pronunciation of "nuclear" as "noo-kyu-lur". It was derided as uneducated and backwards, and just wrong. His further linguistic fumbles didn't make matters easier, but it was "noo-kyu-lur" we kept coming back to: it was a centerpiece of comedian Will Ferrell's impersonation of Bush, and it was featured several times as The Daily Show's "Moment of Zen". Before too long, rumors were circulating about Bush's low IQ (false), and his Bushisms were widely scrutinized and mocked – and even diagnosed by a country doctor in Michigan as potential pre-senile dementia, or early-onset Alzheimer's (unverified, but also likely false).
Poor George W Bush: his "uneducated" pronunciation of "nuclear" isn't unique. It occurs in educated speech, though considered by some to be questionable or unacceptable. Nonetheless, it is common in some parts of the American south and was used by Dwight D Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W Bush (though his presidential father, George Bush Sr, uses the unstigmatized pronunciation "noo-klee-ur"). Eisenhower was the 13th President of Columbia University; Jimmy Carter took graduate courses in nuclear physics; Bill Clinton got his JD from Yale; and Bush graduated from Harvard Business School. Like them or not, you can't argue they aren't educated.
In spite of all that, Bush's fate was sealed. Even now, a Google search for "George W Bush nuclear..." offers a number of auto-complete options: " … weapons", " … energy", " … proliferation", " … disarmament". But "nuclear pronunciation" is at the top of the list.
But grammar is important, and so it is, but register is not about grammar. It is primarily about speaking within a context, about tone, and about expectation. No one's language use is calcified into an unwaveringly formal or informal register – not even Harding's.
Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania notes:
You can make any public figure sound like a boob, if you record everything he says and set hundreds of hostile observers to combing the transcripts.
A good point, but one we are unlikely to take to heart when it comes to how our politicians navigate register. Already, the complaints about Obama's informal "than me" have started.
