In the Fogle Shakespeare, the line reads, "Alas, poor Yor"

We've been considering the abuses of language in this presidential campaign, in an unplanned, ad hoc way. Over at South Carolina is So Gay, we're reminded of one example today: dropping the 'ic" from "Democratic Party." Scoop Doggy uses the form more often than not, but not always...because it's fake and artificial and has no value other than to irritate. You'd like to think the GOP is made up of more grownups than not, but we've been wrong before.

In 2006 Hendrick Hertzberg looked into the phenomenon, which I first recall rearing its head in 1976 with veep nominee Bob Dole and his invocation of "Democrat Wars."

Hertzberg wrote:

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.” At a slightly higher level of sophistication, it’s an attempt to deny the enemy the positive connotations of its chosen appellation. During the Cold War, many people bridled at obvious misnomers like “German Democratic Republic,” and perhaps there are some members of the Republican Party (which, come to think of it, has been drifting toward monarchism of late) who genuinely regard the Democratic Party as undemocratic. Perhaps there are some who hope to induce it to go out of existence by refusing to call it by its name, à la terming Israel “the Zionist entity.” And no doubt there are plenty of others who say “Democrat Party” just to needle the other side while signalling solidarity with their own—the partisan equivalent of flashing a gang sign.

The history of “Democrat Party” is hard to pin down with any precision, though etymologists have traced its use to as far back as the Harding Administration. According to William Safire, it got a boost in 1940 from Harold Stassen, the Republican Convention keynoter that year, who used it to signify disapproval of such less than fully democratic Democratic machine bosses as Frank Hague of Jersey City and Tom Pendergast of Kansas City. Senator Joseph McCarthy made it a regular part of his arsenal of insults, which served to dampen its popularity for a while. There was another spike in 1976, when grumpy, growly Bob Dole denounced “Democrat wars” (those were the days!) in his Vice-Presidential debate with Walter Mondale. Growth has been steady for the last couple of decades, and today we find ourselves in a golden age of anti-“ic”-ism.

In the conservative media, the phenomenon feeds more voraciously the closer you get to the mucky, sludgy bottom. “Democrat Party” is standard jargon on right-wing talk radio and common on winger Web sites like NewsMax.com, which blue-pencils Associated Press dispatches to de-“ic” references to the Party of F.D.R. and J.F.K. (The resulting impression that “Democrat Party” is O.K. with the A.P. is as phony as a North Korean travel brochure.) 

One langugage maven, Hertzberg added, thought such locutions sort of ghetto-y:

The respectable conservative journals of opinion sprinkle the phrase around their Web sites but go light on it in their print editions. William F. Buckley, Jr., the Miss Manners cum Dr. Johnson of modern conservatism, dealt with the question in a 2000 column in National Review, the magazine he had founded forty-five years before. “I have an aversion to ‘Democrat’ as an adjective,” Buckley began.

Dear Joe McCarthy used to do that, and received a rebuke from this at-the-time 24-year-old. It has the effect of injecting politics into language, and that should be avoided. Granted there are difficulties, as when one desires to describe a “democratic” politician, and is jolted by possible ambiguity. 

But English does that to us all the time, and it’s our job to get the correct meaning transmitted without contorting the language.