Election-speak season The Public Square
By Howard Scarrow
November 05, 2008 | 03:39 PM Every election year our English vocabulary is transformed. Here are three examples. In the 1996 presidential election Republican candidate Bob Dole, competing with Bill Clinton, suggested that voters ask themselves, "Who do you trust?" As any grammarian knows, the question should have been "Whom do you trust?" Yet as William Safire noted in a subsequent "On Language" column in The New York Times, such grammatically correct usage "comes across as an affectation." Thus Safire announced a corollary to "Safire's Law:" to begin a sentence "who" is to be preferred over "whom." Today all of us can breathe easier as we ask our friends "Who are you going to vote for?" Another technically incorrect usage occurs in discussion of public opinion polls, when "percent" is used rather than the correct "percentage point." When a New York Times/CBS poll asked voters whether they had a favorable opinion of the two presidential candidates, and 53 percent said they viewed Sen. Obama favorably but only 33 percent said they viewed Sen. McCain favorably, the Times correctly reported that on that question Obama had a 20 percentage point lead over McCain. Yet a respected radio commentator, referring to that poll, reported that Obama had "a 20 percent higher approval rating than McCain." In similar usage, a recent article in the New Yorker reported that working-class voters voted overwhelming for Bush twice, "by seventeen percent in 2000 and twenty-three percent in 2004." The baseball museum at Cooperstown celebrates the "elite" of major league baseball, and high school graduates hope to be accepted at one of the "elite" colleges. Yet in election years "elite" becomes a pejorative label. Columnist Bill Kristol mocks the "elite media," and Obama, like Kerry in 2004, is seen as part of the out-of-touch, intellectual, sophisticated cultural elite, and his wife an elitist for wearing a stylish dress (a charge that backfired when Gov. Sarah Palin's $150,000 wardrobe was revealed). Every season has its own lexicon. Howard Scarrow is a political science professor emeritus at Stony Brook University. He writes an occasional column on the political scene.