About this item
Insulting the president is an American tradition. From Washington to Trump, presidents have been called "lazy," "feeble," "pusillanimous," and more. Our leaders have been derided as "ignoramuses," "idiots," "morons," and "fatheads," and have been compared to all manner of animals--worms and whales and hyenas, sad jellyfish, strutting crows, lap dogs, reptiles, and monkeys.Political insults tell us what we value in our leaders by showing how we devalue them. In Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels, linguist Edwin Battistella collects over five hundred insults aimed at American presidents. Covering the broad sweep of American history, he puts insults in their place-the political and cultural context of their times.
About the Author
Edwin L. Battistella teaches linguistics and writing at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon. He is the author of six books and over fifty articles. Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology (Oxford University Press, 2014 [in production]) analyzes the public apologies of presidents, politicians, entertainers, and businessmen, situating the apology within American popular culture and showing how language creates sincere or insincere apologies, why we choose to apologize or don't, and how our efforts to say we are sorry succeed or fail. A Year of New Words (Literary Ashland Press, 2013) is a short series of essays and a glossary reporting on my 2012 project of making up a word a day. Bad Language: Are Some Words Better Than Others? (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Do You Make These Mistakes in English? The Story of Sherwin Cody's Famous Language School (Oxford University Press, 2009) are about language attitudes. Bad Language was a cultural history of language attitudes - why we consider some uses and words better than others. It was named one of the Chicago Tribune's "10 Best Books on Language" in 2005 and it was an Oregon Book Award finalist in 2006. Do You Make These Mistakes in English? was a cultural history of the self-education movement focusing on the life of writer Sherwin Cody, an entrepreneur of English whose long-running correspondence course invited the upwardly mobile to spend just fifteen minutes a day improving their English. It made the Library Journal's 2009 list of Best Sellers in Language. Markedness: The Evaluative Superstructure of Language (SUNY Press, 1989) and The Logic of Markedness (Oxford University Press, 1996) are about linguistic theory, specifically the structuralist concept of asymmetry between opposites and its later development in generative grammar. Battistella served as Dean of the School of Arts & Letters at Southern Oregon University from 2000-2006 and as interim Provost from 2007-2008. He is on the board of directors of Oregon Humanities, the state humanities council, and on the editorial board of The Oregon Encyclopedia, and the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America. He has been interviewed on the BBC, NPR's Jefferson Public Radio, for C-Span2's Book TV and in the NEH magazine Humanities. He also moderates the Literary Ashland blog and twitter feed.
