our buddy echidne of the snakes, one of the great guest bloggers working over at eschaton these days (duncan who?), has a modest proposal, with which we concur:
because it is the era of new bipartisanship, at least based on what i hear from the right of the political aisle, i have a very minor request:
would it be too difficult for all you conservatives to stop dropping the "ic" at the end of the democratic party? it's like that obama-osama thingy. probably just an oversight, but as we are now all civil and courteous, how about fixing this little irritation?
we go even further. in light of brian williams, national anchor for nbc news, constantly saying "democrat party," why not email him to request that he revert back, in the spirit of new bipartisanship, to the traditional term "democratic party?"
more after the jump:
if you do email brian, be sure to cc skippybkroo@aol.com, to let us know!
addendum: for you history and/or language geeks, wikipedia points out how much of a pejorative the phrase "democrat party" really is:
democrat party is a political epithet used by many conservative commentators and by some past and present leaders of the republican party (including the republican national committee, the white house, and president george w. bush) in speeches and press releases instead of the name (or more precisely, the proper noun) democratic party.
the use of the word "democrat" instead of "democratic" in the party name is controversial, with many party members seeing it as a sign of disrespect.; hendrik hertzberg argues, "there’s no great mystery about the motives behind this deliberate misnaming. 'democrat party' is a slur, or intended to be - a handy way to express contempt. aesthetic judgments are subjective, of course, but 'democrat party' is jarring verging on ugly. it fairly screams 'rat'."
more from the above-mentioned hendrik hertzberg:
the job of politicians, however, is different, and among those of the republican persuasion "democrat party" is now nearly universal. this is partly the work of newt gingrich, the nominal author of the notorious 1990 memo "language: a key mechanism of control," and his contract with america pollster, frank luntz, the johnny appleseed of such linguistic innovations as "death tax" for estate tax and "personal accounts" for social security privatization. luntz, who road-tested the adjectival use of "democrat" with a focus group in 2001, has concluded that the only people who really dislike it are highly partisan adherents of the—how you say?—democratic party. "those two letters actually do matter," luntz said the other day. he added that he recently finished writing a book—it’s entitled "words that work"—and has been diligently going through the galley proofs taking out the hundreds of "ic"s that his copy editor, one of those partisan dems, had stuck in.
double addendum: just to be clear, the charter (pdf file) of the democratic party calls the democratic party "the democratic party." in our mind, it's rather like the citizens of the capital of south dakota, who insist they live in "peer," not "pee-aire," south dakota. the folks that occupy the space ought to be the ones who know what that space is called.