Bushism's analysis update:

It's been over 6 months since our last examination of Bushisms. All along, we've been trying to see if some sort of pattern would emerge. Was it subject-object confusion? Improper tenses? Sloppy use of singular and plural? Mixing up words that sound-alike?

Well, here is the table for over 250 Bushisms (almost all from Slate's collection, but we found a few on our own). While there are a large number of instances where Bush uses a word that sounds like the one he intended to speak (e.g. "consumption" vs. "conservation"), we no longer think that there is a narrow category of errors that explains why Bush talks the way he does.

Put simply, the errors appear throughout the thinking process. He makes mistakes in concept handling, sentence construction, word retrieval, and pronunciation. As much as we were hoping to find a pattern (or patterns), we now conclude that the reason for all the Bushisms is that the man is not intelligent. His dimness is not a creation of late-night comedians. It's a serious problem.

NOTE: We are aware that all people make mistakes from time to time and that looking for Bushisms brings to light errors that would normally be forgotten, but he's spoken peculiarly over 250 times in four years* - or about once every 5 days. That's and unusually high rate - especially for a guy who (in times of war!) should be careful with his speech.

* - the record goes back to Spring 1999.

posted by Quiddity at 5/14/2003 02:46:00 PM