Brugge Blog

George Lakoff, eminent linguist, will apparently be talking politics on Alternet this election year. The first entry in the series starts out making it sound as though he might apply some of his deep insights into linguistics to the issues of the campaign for both parties - what devices are they using to get their message across, and what devices are they overlooking, for example.

But this first interview with him seems to devolve all too quickly into more standard rants against Bush and his policies. From the second question on, there’s nothing that distinguishes Lakoff from any other pundit, and that’s too bad. His research into linguistics and cognitive pyschology has produced remarkable findings, and I think it would be fascinating to hear some analysis of the messages of both sides, especially as ways for the Democratics to improve things.

Or perhaps I’m not as up on Lakoff as I might be. His book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind is a dense academic treatise, and although it’s on linguistics, it was a formative book for my own thinking on software development a number of years ago, and I sensed that he was A Sharp Guy. His views within the field it seems are not necessarily mainstream, but he makes them compelling. His book Metaphors We Live By seems to be a shorter and more approachable book, although I haven’t read it. This, though, is what I would expect him to draw from in the AlterNet interview.

I see, though, that he has a newer release, Moral Politics : How Liberals and Conservatives Think. From the sounds of it, they could just reprint excerpts from this book and have enough to easily last until November.

Or perhaps I should just skip the AlterNet columns and buy the book.