Mr. Nunberg Goes To Washington

NPR’s Fresh Air may be the only media outlet with a linguist on its masthead. Check out Geoff Nunberg‘s fascinating 29 April discussion of the Right’s writers’ distinctive and repeated and rhythmic use of conjunctions, a rhetorical device known as polysyndeton. Nunberg (whose site at Stanford has a transcript and extensive excerpts in the footnotes) traces polysyndeton’s “voice of the common man”-ist usage from Walt Whitman through some thought-provoking film world sources.