President Obama giving his speech in Philadelphia on race last year

The media attention to President Obama‘s use of language may seem unprecedented, if only because his comparative eloquence follows eight years of an inarticulate and deliberately evasive administration. But George W. Bush got his share of attention. His utterances gave rise to a new word, “Bushism,” examples of which filled a series of popular books and confirmed Orwell’s diagnosis of political speech as
“largely the defence of the indefensible. … Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”

By contrast, according to Roderick P. Hart, a communications professor at the University of Texas, Austin, quoted in this essay from NPR.org, Obama is the league leader in talking straight. Hart oversees the Campaign Mapping Project, which, among other things, tracks the language patterns of presidential candidates. The project found that compared with the other 24 folks who ran for the presidency between 1948 and 2008, Obama was the lowest on “Complexity” — a measure of average word size — and also lowest on “Embellishment” — a measure of the ratio of adjectives-plus-adverbs to nouns-plus-verbs.

“In other words,” Hart says, Obama “is, comparatively, a ‘straight talker’ or, less controversially, a ‘plain-spoken Midwesterner.’ ”

The occasion for NPR’s bit is Obama’s use of “I screwed up” to describe his vetting of Tom Daschle as secretary of health and human services. According to NPR’s reporter, Linton Weeks, the “Oxford English Dictionary points out that in the U.S., the phrase may also have originated as a euphemism using the sexual connotation of screw.” Which may help explain why, in The Washington Times, Jennifer Harper found that “‘the indecorous quality’ of Obama’s comment offended some political analysts.”

And why the indecorous quality of Bush’s obscene reign did not.