In a recent speech, President Bush offered this insight into what some call the rhetorical situation:
The only thing I can tell you is that when I speak, I'm very conscience about the audiences that are listening to my words.Apparently the president is so conscious of his "audiences" that he sometimes loses track of his words. As we note in Choosing the Correct Word, the noun conscience means "the sense of what is right and wrong." The adjective conscious means "being aware." The president, we suspect, fully intended to be conscious.
Of course, our intention is not to poke fun at the Communicator-in-Chief. Rather, as students of the language, we should express our gratitude. Over the course of his administration, George W. Bush has generously illustrated many principles of English grammar and usage. Here are just a few:
- "You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test."
(February 21, 2001)
Credit to Mr. Bush for attempting to use a singular pronoun to refer to a singular noun ("a child"), but both of the pronouns in this sentence really should be in the subjective case: not "he or her" but "he or she." (See Using the Different Forms of Pronouns.) - "When we get the facts, we'll share it with the American people."
(November 8, 2001)
Ah, but those pronouns can be almost as slippery as the facts. Let's quietly change "it" to "them" to agree with the noun "facts." (The president may want to work on this Practice Exercise on Pronouns.) - "It's a time of sorrow and sadness when we lose a loss of life."
(December 21, 2004)
Indeed. Such needless repetition is called pleonasm. - "The goals of this country is to enhance prosperity and peace."
(speaking at the White House Conference on Global Literacy, September 18, 2006)
Presumably distracted by "this country" (the singular object of the preposition "of"), the president missed the plural subject, "goals." Our advice: use "are," not "is," and visit Correcting Errors in Subject-Verb Agreement. - "We've got pockets of persistent poverty in our society, which I refuse to declare defeat--I mean, I refuse to allow them to continue on. And so one of the things that we're trying to do is to encourage a faith-based initiative to spread its wings all across America, to be able to capture this great compassionate spirit."
(March 18, 2002)
Fortunately, the mixed metaphors here distract from the more serious breakdowns in syntax. - "Suiciders are willing to kill innocent life in order to send the projection that this is an impossible mission."
(April 3, 2007)
"I want to remind you all that in order to fight and win the war, it requires an expenditure of money that is commiserate with keeping a promise to our troops to make sure that they're well-paid, well-trained, well-equipped."
(December 2003)
"And the question is, are we going to be facile enough to change with--will we be nimble enough; will we be able to deal with the circumstances on the ground? And the answer is, yes, we will."
(July 25, 2006)
"Columbia carried in its payroll classroom experiments from some of our students in America."
(February 11, 2003)
"Projection"? "commiserate"? "facile"? "payroll"? Not since Mrs. Malaprop herself have we witnessed such a master of malapropism.
So thank you, President Bush, for expanding the range of the English language and for helping America to become what you once described as "a literate country and a hopefuller country."
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