At first something about what the president was saying just didn’t ring true. Imagine that.
“We’re kicking ass,” Bush told Australia’s deputy prime minister, Mark Vaile, when asked about how things were going in Iraq, The Sydney Morning Herald reported last week.
Our vernacular-loving commander in chief’s assessment seemed a little off. Weren’t August civilian deaths at their second-highest monthly level of the year? Haven’t we had three months this year in which more than 100 U.S. soldiers were killed? Aren’t this year’s numbers of U.S. soldiers killed on track to far outpace any other year since the war began? (Not rhetorical questions. Yes, yes and yes.)
Could Bush have chosen the wrong cowboy-speak at the wrong time?
Surprisingly, maybe not.
The phrase “kick ass” is relatively new. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate dates it to just 1970; the Oxford Dictionary of Slang, 1976. “Used to denote aggressively assertive behavior,” reads the ODS entry, “including the reprimanding of subordinates or opponents.”
Though our military success may be questionable, we’ve definitely got the “aggressively assertive behavior” thing down pat. Australia is just about the only country we haven’t been “aggressively assertive” with.
And reprimanding subordinates? We’re really good at that, too, never letting higher-ups (Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Cheney) take the fall.
Everybody makes fun of George Bush’s malapropisms, but this may be one he actually got right.
Patriot Whacked
Last week a federal judge threw out parts of the Patriot Act, calling it unconstitutional and in violation of the First Amendment and generally yucky.
Judge Victor Marrero based his decision on the Bill of Rights and separation of powers concerns, since the Patriot Act allowed the government to force telephone and Internet companies to turn over records, then forbid them to tell their customers what they’d done.
But those of us concerned with the printed word prefer to think of Marrero as striking another blow against the worst acronym ever (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act). We were sick of having to write out “USA PATRIOT Act” with all those ugly caps. Our nation’s copy editors are now at peace. Maybe the nation itself can follow suit.
This week in the Angry Grammarian podcast: Co-workers sound off on my grammatical stinginess. Subscribe free at www.theangrygrammarian.com.