Jon Chait’s move to New York magazine has been annoying for two reasons. First, he doesn’t blog as much as he used to. Second, the only way to read his occasional posts is to plow through New York’s entire effing Daily Intel blog and pick them out from among the endless Big Apple-oriented detritus that I don’t care about. On the bright side, though, all this plowing has introduced me to Dan Amira, who’s worth the price of admission.
(But only barely, Dan. Can’t you convince the powers-that-be to give you and Chait your own blog so I can more easily ignore the rest of the riffraff?)
Anyway, here he is today with a lexicographic tour of the mind of Newt Gingrich:
By now, we’ve all become familiar with Newt Gingrich’s habit of using a few choice adverbs to make the things he says sound just a bit more intelligent to his listeners. Profoundly. Deeply. Frankly. But none of them are as vital to
the Gingrich lexicon as fundamentally (along with its cousin, the adjective fundamental).
….To give you a more complete understanding of how compulsively Gingrich abuses his favorite words, I searched Nexis transcripts and news accounts with the goal of plucking out every single phrase in which he uttered them. I started in the present day, and made it all the way to the beginning of 2007 before I had to stop, for my own health and sanity, which, according to my editors, was beginning to suffer in noticeable ways….Scroll onward, if you dare, to behold all loosely alphabetized 418 entries.
“fundamentally a falsehood”
“fundamentally a lie”
“fundamentally a violation of international law”
“fundamentally about reassessing our entire strategy in the region”[410 more….]
“fundamentally wrong with it”
“fundamentally wrong with the current system”
“fundamentally wrong with the system”
“fundamentally wrong with weakness in America”
Now that’s what Lexis was invented for and what blogging is all about: to quantify just how big a blowhard Newt Gingrich is. Kudos.
