Bushism

[Dr Unne]

If you had someone write down your spoken words exactly as you speak them, you'd probably be rather surprised how almost incoherent they are. That's the nature of spoken language. We studied it a bit in a linguistics class I took. We think much faster than we can talk, and we parse language in a way that we hear what we're expecting to hear, for the most part. You can mix up words and leave them out, and the context carries your message across, along with nonverbal communication and whatnot. One good example is the Watergate tapes. This is what natural conversation looks like.

Nixon: Oh, Mitchell, Mitchell was at the point that you made on this, that exactly what I need from you is on the--
Haldeman: Gemstone, yeah.
Nixon: All right, fine, I understand it all. We won't second-guess Mitchell and the rest. Thank God it wasn't Colson.
Haldeman: The FBI interviewed Colson yesterday. They determined that would be a good thing to do.
Nixon: Um hum.
Haldeman: Ah, to have him take a...
Nixon: Um hum.
Haldeman: An interrogation, which he did, and that, the FBI guys working the case had concluded that there were one or two possibilities, one, that this was a White House, they don't think that there is anything at the Election Committee, they think it was either a White House operation and they had some obscure reasons for it, non political,...
Nixon: Uh huh.
Haldeman: or it was a...
Nixon: Cuban thing-
Haldeman: Cubans and the CIA. And after their interrogation of, of...
Nixon: Colson.