Presentation on Bush-isms

Though I still won't stand up for Bush as one of our greatest presidential speakers, I've got to hand it to his tutor because Bush certainly sounds a lot more intelligent than he used to. After my freshman year of college I went home during the summer and ended up seeing Bush talk with the president of Poland. Bush used smaller words and formed his sentences in such a way that the Polish president sounded much more knowledgeable in English than our president. I leaned over to my boss to tell him this and he told me to keep it quiet or we'd be arrested by the secret service guys. On that note, I remember Professor Fishman saying that Bush may have exaggerated his accent and speech in order to sound more country-like, but I disagree, I think he really just talks that way. I grew up in Pennsylvania and Michigan for most of my life and never had an accent; after a couple years at Clemson I'd come home and my family would do double takes when I said things like "might could" or "thank youuu" in a nicely-developing southern drawl. And where Bush really messes up isn't with his southern words, it's with his plain English - he used to not think at all about what is packed into the words he's choosing to use. Maybe he's appealing to the strong vein of Republicans here in the south, but if he is the accent is probably the least effective way, since so many people equate it with sub-standard education.

As for the actual presentation, though I know David looked at the speeches himself, since none of the rest of us had I became confused when he moved back and forth examining between them. I understand that he was outlining Bush's patterns of speaking, what he tends to focus on more or less, so I guess the Bush-isms were more for humor's sake. It's too bad that in most cases all it would take would be changing a single word in one of Bush's bold statements to make it palatable...but then again, Bush is the most closely-watched man in the world. I think that David covered everything he needed to, but perhaps if there was less text on the slides and only the very basics of what we needed to see were up there, then I could have followed better.