More Posse-Footing

”’WE is roundin’ up a posse to git that varmint outta town,” says the leader of an armed band of predominately white American avengers.

”Hey, Dick, is this my happy face or my grumpy face?”

”As Win-stone Church-hill once said, ‘Let’s fight those bitches”’. (”Yeeha!”) ”Arm yerselves and be men of valour.” (”Yahoo!”) ”This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning of the end of the end.”

It’s rousing stuff, and when it comes to the matter of Saddam Hussain, George Dubya Bush (for it is he) grows ever more loquacious.

To mutilate some more Churchillian rhetoric, the USA might well be the linchpin of the English-speaking world, but in the throat of that country’s 43rd President, the pin resembles that pulled from a ready-to-explode grenade.

The Times and Guardian have pictures of the moment Bush met congressional leaders to talk of war with I-raq, but the Independent has excerpts of what was said.

And it was a lesson in language as the President added two new words to the political lexicon. Bush said that Hussain had ”stiffed” and ”crawfished” the international community.

For those not versed in Lone Star English, stiffed is, as you might have guessed, to cheat someone, to take them for a sucker. And perish the thought that anyone would do that to a man who nearly kills himself with a pretzel.

The crawfish part is a nice touch and, according to the papers, means to ”retreat from a position, to back out, to fail to stick to a statement made”.

Good stuff, and a twist on the language of Bush’s one remaining ally, Tony Blair, whose ”polenta-ing” (mashing together grains of ideas to form an insipid, barely constructed gloop) is the dish of the day in the UK.

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Posted: 5th, September 2002 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink