Breaking it down for you
by The Economist | NEW YORK
At Language Log, Mark Liberman takes a look at George Bush's use of the phrase "in other words". Does Mr Bush overuse the phrase? Mr Liberman's back-of-the-envelope statistical work shows that he uses it a lot more than most folks. He surmises that it's just Mr Bush's empty thought-connecter, a sentence qualifier. Almost everyone has one, whether it's "you know" or "I mean" or plain old "so". The president just leans on "in other words" when connecting thoughts. Sometimes it leads to the comedy of the president using almost the exact same words in different order.
But I noticed another pattern. From the speech that Mr Liberman analyses, here are some examples:
"sectarian strife. In other words, the government wasn't ready to provide security"
"asymmetrical warfare, or $50 weapons are sometimes used to defeat expensive vehicles. In other words, these are different times."
"UAVs -- unmanned aerial vehicles -- infrared detection devices. In other words, this border is becoming modernized."
"transferred seamlessly from the Defense health system to the Veterans health system. In other words, one of my concerns is that there is a gap"
It seems to me that "in other words" comes often after what Bush seems to consider a fancy bit of officialese.
In 2005, blogger Paul B said that Bush is so stupid, he is figuring out what things mean on the fly. He spots another example like this
"Life expectancy was about 60 years old. In other words, you were expected to live that long."
But I don't think Bush is really so stupid.
I heard someone say of someone else recently, "he's the kind of guy who breaks it down for you." It was an amiable, not-too-harsh putdown. It's not "he's arrogant and condescending", quite. It's that he really styles himself a straight shooter, a man's man, one of those few people who can see through the cant and the crap, and he's going to do you a favour and break it down for you.
Bush breaks it down for you. That's why you see it so often in the "life expectancy" and "asymmetrical warfare" kind of examples—I'm sounding like Washington! I better get real and break it down again. I think he's so eager to break it down for you that he's come to rely on "in other words", and that's why he sometimes uses it as mere pause-filler.
Bush's "in other words" is born of a decent human instinct and also a canny political tactic: sound like the people, not like the officials. But he's come to define himself so much with it that its use has become nigh-absurd.
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