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Book Jacket TALKING RIGHT
How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show
GEOFFREY NUNBERG
SUMMARY  |  EXCERPT   |  AUTHOR'S NOTE   |  QUOTES
A captivating and outraged account of "The Great Relabeling" of American language and thought, by the well-known "Fresh Air" commentator and author of Going Nucular

Geoffrey Nunberg breaks new ground with this fierce and funny narrative of how the political right has ushered in a new world order, aided unwittingly by the liberal media. Democrats are well known for their "lousy bumper stickers," as Joe Klein puts it. As liberals wade through the semantics of "social security lockbox," "single payer," and other wonky locutions, the right has become harder, meaner and better at getting out the message: the estate tax became the more menacing "death tax" and a contentious education initiative was wrapped in the comforting (and memorable) blanket of "No Child Left Behind." But Nunberg shows that the real story is more subtle than just a bumper sticker war. Conservatives' main goal wasn't to win voters over to their positions on healthcare, education, or the environment. They had a much more dramatic ambition. By changing the meaning of words like "values," "government," "liberal"; "faith," and "freedom," conservatives have shifted the political center of gravity of the language itself to the right. "Whatever our politics," Nunberg observes, "when we talk about politics nowadays, we can't help using language that embodies a conservative world-view."

Geoffrey Nunberg is a linguist who teaches at the Berkeley School of Information. He is chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. Since 1989, he has done a language feature on NPR's "Fresh Air," and his commentaries on language and politics are regularly seen in the Sunday New York Times and other publications. A winner of the Linguistic Society of America's Language and the Public Interest Award, he is also the author of The Way We Talk Now and Going Nucular. Nunberg lives in San Francisco, California.
See also Going Nucular by Geoffrey Nunberg
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Author appearances: New York; San Francisco; Los Angeles
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HARDCOVER
ISBN 978-1-58648-386-9
Pub date: 07/05/06
Price: $26.00/34.95 Canada
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
272 pages
none
Carton Quantity: 28
Current Events, Politics, Popular Culture
Selling Territory: W
Rights:

PAPERBACK
ISBN 978-1586485092
Pub date: 07/02/07
Price: $15.95/19.50 Canada
5 1/2 x 8 1/4
304 pages
Carton Quantity: 36
Media Studies, Politics
Selling Territory: W
Pub history: PublicAffairs hc

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