Thursday, January 16, 2014

DON'T CONFUSE NOONAN WITH THE FACTS
Which gets us, inevitably, to the King of I, who unselfconsciously claims ownership of ... everything. "My military," "my White House," "my cabinet," "my secretary." The president does first person singular more than Mr. Christie does.

--Peggy Noonan in her latest Wall Street Journal column

Christie used the word "I" 692 times during his 108-minute stay in front of the national and state media [on Thursday], according to Dana Milbank. He said, "I'm" 119 times and "I've" another 67. The words "me" came out of the governor's mouth 83 times and for good measure he said "me" or "myself" on 134 occasions, [Dana] Milbank reported.

--Newark Star Ledger on January 10, citing this Dana Milbank column
Yeah, Obama's way more of an egomaniac -- Peggy knows that's true because, well, it just is.

3 comments:

Victor said...

And of course, if Obama didn't say "I" or "me" or "my" or "mine," than he'd be trying to distance himself from all of the problems he, and he alone - with maybe Hillary's help - is responsible for.

I've said it before - if Obama could walk on water and raise the dead, the Conservatives would say that walking on water means that n*gger's too lazy and stupid to swim, and that staying dead is far better than being resurrected into a world where Obama is still the President.

Boudica said...

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=9636#more-9636

Linguists debunk the first person pronoun overusage....of everybody.....

Glennis said...

Nice link, Boudica:

From this we can conclude two things: First, that political apologies are indeed more self-referential than the general run of political press conferences; and second, that George F. Will is singularly uninsightful and also … well, something else. It's normal for George Will to state falsehoods as if they were obviously true — but he seem oddly committed to this particular false claim about Obama's pronoun usage.