By Trevor Butterworth

Published in The Washington Post's Book World
July 29, 2001

THE BUSH DYSLEXICON
Observations on a National Disorder
By Mark Crispin Miller

At first sight, the coinage "dyslexicon" sparkles with an inventiveness worthy of Borges: One can imagine a librarian of Babel gesturing to row upon row of dictionaries that attempt to explain, like a pathological Dr. Seuss, the meaning of each word by referring to all the words that it doesn't mean; a cat is not a bat, nor a mat, nor a tree and so on.

But at the prosaic intersection of politics and media, what exactly is a dyslexicon? Out of curiosity, I ran the word by a friend, who is both Greek and a linguist, to see what she made of it. At first, not very much: the Greek roots dys and lexicon didn't suggest anything more than they did in English -- which is to say, a bad or badly formed dictionary or vocabulary -- and the obvious association with dyslexia ran into a semantic dead end. In short, the word didn't refer to anything. But when I told her how it was being used -- as a characterization of the American president's command of English -- she got it immediately and chided me, as linguists are wont to do, for not supplying the context to begin with.

It is precisely this kind of inference from context that enables us to cut through the mangled web of speech and understand what our fellow humans are trying to say. And given the rarity of unrehearsed eloquence, this is something we are accustomed to doing without much conscious effort. The natural state of interpretive charity is taxed only by the most grievous errors or Byzantine confusions -- or when, like Freud, we start to infer beyond the literal and see a verbal slip as a proxy for something deeper. Though the theory behind the "Freudian slip" has little scientific purchase nowadays, the idea that we reveal who we really are in our speech is powerful because it seems intuitive: We think in words, therefore our words must show how we think.

The problem with The Bush Dyslexicon is that Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media ecology at New York University, is not interested in a genuine linguistic analysis of Bush's speech. Though he asserts that verbal defects and dyslexia cannot adequately explain the full range of Bushisms, he never suggests the conditions by which verbal error stops being mere error and becomes a revelation about the true nature of the candidate. As a consequence, there is no gaffe that cannot be interpreted to show Bush's woeful "uninterestedness," "callousness," "ignorance" "inability to reason," "incoherence" -- or his "absolute unfitness" to be president. Indeed, Miller is so reluctant to bestow interpretative charity upon his target that had Bush inadvertently coined "dyslexicon" to describe his blunders during the campaign that, too, presumably, would be held against him.

Miller's jeremiad also extends to the media. The transparent awfulness of the Bush candidacy went unscrutinized, Miller argues, because -- "subtly guided by propagandists of the right" -- the television media showed itself to be "fatally dyslexic when it comes to doping out the very spectacle that it presents." (Whether one can be guided and dyslexic is a moot point: Sixty-five pages later, we are bleakly informed of the "rightist conquest of the [network] news divisions.") In conjunction with the actions of the "sedentary putschists of the Supreme Court," the GOP and the major media forced Bush on us. The Bush Dyslexicon demonstrates that left-wing media criticism can be every bit as cartoonish as that from the right.

And unfortunately for Miller's argument, actual research into the coverage of campaign 2000 turns up no evidence of a "rightist conquest." One analysis of prime-time news coverage by the Brookings Institute and the Center for Media and Public Affairs showed that, far from forcing Bush on us, the networks were, on balance, equally negative in their evaluations of both candidates. And even if there had been any detectable slant in either ideological direction, it may have counted for little, as the media world continues to fragment and public attention drifts out of reach of the networks' once-univocal authority: A study by the Committee for Concerned Journalists showed that the public often departed from the media take on issues and events during campaign 2000.

Though there is no shortage of other research on the media's role in presidential elections, nor want of excellent books by journalists on this topic (such as Marty Plissner's recent The Control Room), Miller seems as uninterested in what television news actually reported in campaign 2000 as he is in understanding why 50 million people decided to vote for Bush.

Still, Miller might have at least thought of asking a linguist whether there is more than meets the eye in the catalogue of Bush's verbal errors. But he didn't, and unfortunately, the results would seem to show that a dyslexicon is, ultimately, a work of dyslexicography.