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The time seemed ripe for some kind of national language leadership. The basic question was whether formal American English was being—or should be—replaced and whether influential Americans should embrace the winds of change. A related question was who was going to step forward to help find the answers?

By the late 1980s, President George H. W. Bush had shown some awareness of the overall challenge when he offered up an occasional malapropism or grammatical lapse. At a formal dinner for the Pakistani prime minister on June 6, 1989, he admitted, “Fluency in English is something that I’m often not accused of.”

But the next president, Bill Clinton, had too much love for formal English to lead a popular rebellion against it. His only public lapse came during a brief moment when he was questioned about the Monica Lewinsky matter, and he found it necessary to question the meaning of the word is. For this, he was sometimes called a cunning linguist.

JOY IN MUDDLEVILLE

The five-to-four Supreme Court decision in the contested election of George W. Bush as president in 2000—while ballots were still being counted in Florida—brought unbounded joy to the ranks of language rebels. Bush had clearly shown an intriguing originality with words during the campaign. He wasted no time connecting with the public mood when he blurted out, “They misunderestimated me,” after his election.6

With those three words, George W. clearly signaled that he was primed for a leadership role in the language wars. Although he must have been exposed to some formal English at Andover and Yale, he obviously was more interested in things he didn’t need lessons in, such as baseball and bar hopping. From watching his father, he also had become fully aware that a generous amount of broken English could bring handsome political rewards to men of privilege by leveling them linguistically with the hoi polloi.

However, his feisty mom presented a slight problem. Eleven years earlier, she had noticed a failure of many American families—possibly including her own—to be able to read and write English. So she formed the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, no doubt to share the lessons that some in her own family had failed to learn at home with people who might better appreciate them.

In the end, she did not stand in George’s way, and he was off and running. It was not until three years into his presidential term that he finally realized what his mom was so concerned about. He said, “The literary level of our children are appalling.”7 He were not joking.

AUSPICIOUS BEGINNINGS

Bush’s knack for going with the flow of language was fortuitous for all Americans as well as for Amglish. Only three months after his inauguration, he saw the need to finally straighten out the long-standing public confusion over when to use the words lay and lie, just one of the language’s many conundrums. Language authorities had tried for centuries to clear it up, but none had succeeded.

“We understand,” he said, “where the power of this country lay. It lays in the hearts and souls of Americans. It must lay in our pocketbooks. It lays in the willingness for people to work hard. But as importantly, it lay in the fact that we’ve got citizens from all walks of life. . . .”8

The answer was finally clear: Lay is the choice, hands down, in all circumstances. End of problem. But a broader message was implied: that it was okay to wing it when faced with such quandaries in English, including when to use who or whom, will or shall, that or which, further or farther, et cetera. There has always been a leadership vacuum for such quandaries. Language authorities have never been able to explain them adequately.

When history finally assesses George W’s deeds, lax lingo may be his greatest legacy.

WHAT IS IT ABOUT YALE AND LANGUAGE?

Students of Yale University tend to become either internationally famous for their language or hopeless followers.

Prominent in the first group, of course, are the two Bush presidents, lexicographer Noah Webster, and Dr. W. C. Minor, the convicted murderer who