NY Times Sunday Preview: Profile of Linguist Framing Issues for Democrats

[kskiska]

NEW YORK The cover story by Matt Bai in the upcoming Sunday issue of The New York Times Magazine profiles the man some liberals allegedly consider a possible new “messiah” for the Democratic party, George Lakoff. An adviser to the party on “framing” issues, he wrote “Don't Think of an Elephant”-- a book about politics and language based on his own linguistic theories.

“Framing” is the process of choosing the best words to describe individual issues and characterize a debate. Bai hails Lakoff as the father of the concept. His ideas seemed to gain some success recently in putting the Bush social security proposals in peril. Next they will be severely tested in the upcoming fight over Supreme Court nominees.

Lakoff preaches that to understand language on the whole, one must first study how an individual would comprehend that language in terms of personal experience and thought processes. He also says that metaphors allow people to process abstract ideas.

And nobody better used this philosophy before, says Lakoff, than the Republicans. In the 2004 election, George W. Bush labeled John Kerry as a “flip flopper,” and repeated this throughout the duration of the campaign. He even put out an ad that featured Kerry windsurfing, back and forth, which hammered home this idea in a visual manner.

more…
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000980023

[LoZoccolo]

1. Lakoff is a very smart man, but...

...he says something like this:

Lakoff preaches that to understand language on the whole, one must first study how an individual would comprehend that language in terms of personal experience and thought processes.

And then the more hammerheaded of our party ignores such wisdom and interprets Lakoff's message as simply "take a hard stand" (I've seen this more than once, which tells me we're really in trouble), ignoring the nuance of his teachings (they don't like that word for some reason).