RUSSELL PUZZLED OVER PRESIDENT'S ACCENT

(09/05/2006)

Excited linguists have been poring over the president's latest Fourth of July speech at Fort Bragg. "He's been giving the same speech, year after year, about Iraq, saying he's 'not gonna cut and run,' says Reg Watson of Marshall University's Language and Rhetoric Institute. "That provides an extraordinary opportunity to compare his language patterns over a period of time." Watson has detected what he calls "a strange inverse relationship" in the president's speech. "The longer Bush stays in Washington," he says, "the more he sounds like he's from the backwoods. As he repeats the same phrases and slogans, you can just hear his grammar deteriorate, and notice his dropping more and more 'g's' from the end of words." Researchers are still trying to pinpoint the exact nature of the president's accent. "It's not Texas," said one. "More like a Texas accent as spoken at a costume party in Kennebunkport, Maine." ... Read more under   Opinions and Comments

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