Going Nucular: Language, Politics, and Culture in Controversial Times (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "We're all attuned to the word games that other people try to play on us-what we have to watch out for are the ones we..." (more)
Key Phrases: second superpower, Going Nucular, World War, The New York Times Week (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Geoffrey Nunberg can make one quite self conscious to write even a simple sentence. And yes, that is a compliment. A regular language commentator on NPR's Fresh Air, Nunberg examines the curious ways in which the modern language expresses far more about history, politics, and culture than most casual English users would ever realize. Going Nucular, besides having one of the more whimsical titles to come along in a while, offers up scores of chapters, each examining specific words, phrases, or verbal tendencies. And while words like "terrorism", "fascism", "appeasement", and "Caucasian" (and even the hapless "like" and "ain't") are tossed about regularly in contemporary usage, achieving an understanding of their origin and evolution can serve to better explain not just the word but the issue to which it is attached. Other language books have become popular among the "grammarati" for their hard line approach but Nunberg seeks to explore and understand rather than to enforce and punish. To that end, he defends "blog" as being a verb and noun that has earned its place in the language; it's very phonetic clunkiness being part of the appeal. And though he can diagram a sentence with the best of them, Nunberg is at his most delightful when shining a harsh lingual light on the ways in which the average person encounters words every day. A stinging and hilarious indictment of TV news' weird obsession with the present tense ("In North Dakota, high winds making life difficult") makes the reader hear the evening news in an entirely new way. Going Nucular is much more than a nudge and a wisecrack to self-appointed word cops, it's an insider's tour of the vernacular by the English teacher you only wish you had. --John Moe

From Publishers Weekly

Stanford linguistics professor Nunberg suggests using language as a "jumping-off point" to learn more about Americans’ evolving values and attitudes in this feisty, humorous collection of essays gleaned from his NPR and newspaper commentaries. Nunberg cracks the codes embedded in many familiar terms used in media, business, technology and politics to reveal unexpected insights about our fractious society. Marching straight into the culture wars, he observes that the "old-fashioned" racial term "Caucasian" remains an acceptable euphemism for white, unlike the similarly dated racial categories, "Negroid" and "Mongoloid." "Caucasian," he concludes, "is a cultural category in racial drag." He deconstructs the notion of "class warfare" and explores how Americans’ comfort in using the prefix "middle" with "class"—but not "upper" or "working"—speaks volumes about contemporary ideas on wealth, privilege and social mobility. The wordsmith also blows the whistle on the rhetorical gymnastics surrounding the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the war on terror. American foreign policy should not hinge on stamping unfriendly governments with absolute yet conveniently vague epithets like "evil" when a tag like "rogue states" works with fewer indignant howls, he says. As Nunberg’s title suggests, pronunciation can also be political: President Bush’s much-lampooned utterance "nucular" could be either a nod to "Pentagon wise guys" or a sly "faux-bubba" gimmick to curry favor with some voters. While liberals don’t escape criticism, Nunberg unleashes his well-chosen barbs from a left-of-center perch. Conservatives, especially pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Peggy Noonan, receive special scrutiny for what Nunberg says are the simplistic linguistic devices they use to appeal to their audiences. Nunberg avoids hasty conjectures, and the provocative clues scattered across these pages should alert readers to the "linguistic deceptions" in their midst.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: PublicAffairs (May 11, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1586482343
• ISBN-13: 978-1586482343
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #839,475 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #36 in

  Books > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > Political Science > Rhetoric

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Typos and thinkos: language clues in political speech, June 12, 2004

By	Celia Redmore "Celia Redmore" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Geoffrey Nunberg is, amongst other things, a professor of linguistics at Stanford University, but he's better known to most of us for his witty and perceptive commentaries on popular language usage. Going Nucular is a collection of 65 articles, each one based on a word that is commonly used in political speech. It's an eclectic list: terrorism, vision, freedom, régime, hero, torture, capitalism, postmodern, fascist, google. Then, of course, there's nuclear.

I had a momentary fear on receiving this book that it would be yet another diatribe against (or for) the current president, who is well-known for his tendency to mispronounce nuclear as "nucular." But the author reminds us that this word has tripped up a series of presidents from Dwight D Eisenhower to Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton. Nunberg's point, as usual, is more subtle. He notes that some of the people who talk of "nucular weapons" have no difficulty pronouncing "nuclear family." So are they really stubbing their toes on a hard-to-say word or are they indulging in faux-folksy speech?

Warning to grammarians: Nunberg has no patience with the dictionary police. In his opinion, English is at its best in creative hands - just think of Shakespeare. How we use and change words gives those with the ear to hear a wealth of information about how we think. Consider how the media describe those folk in Iraq who oppose US policy. Terrorists? Insurgents? Freedom fighters? Rebels? Patriots? Whichever word is chosen reveals a bias.

All the articles in "Going Nucular: Language, Politics, and Culture in Confrontational Times" originally appeared either on National Public Radio's Fresh Air or one of several major newspapers over the past few years. Together they illustrate how much more words reveal than their dictionary definitions.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Phonies and Manipulators Beware: Nunberg's Got Your Number!, August 2, 2004

By	Professor Donald Mitchell "Jesus Makes Me a P... (Boston) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

The Word Man Cometh! That would have been a better title for this book. Professor Nunberg loves words and loves thinking about what it means when people use certain ones . . . rather than others.

In the last 60 years in the United States, we have seen a substantial increase in the kind of political language that George Orwell satirized in 1984. When it's very overt, we all get the message. When it's a little more subtle, we may be manipulated without realizing it. Professor Nunberg is very sensitive to that problem, and this book will help protect your unconscious mind for unperceived assaults.

Stanford professor of linguistics Dr. Geoffrey Nunberg has taken a number of his "Fresh Air" commentaries and brief articles from leading publications in the last few years, and grouped them into somewhat related areas. He begins with Culture at Large, moves on to War Drums, sidles over to Politics as Usual, looks next at Symbols, before considering Media Words, then lampoons Business Cycles and Tech Talk before finishing with words to help us while we're Watching Our Language.

Foes of President Bush and conservative talk show commentators will probably enjoy the book the most. The title piece looks at the great difficulty the president has in pronouncing "nuclear" when he's referring to atomic issues . . . and takes a sideways swipe at his possible motivations in conceivably making this mistake deliberately.

But the book has more charm than that. In many cases, he shares with us the arrival and departure of various words into common use while giving us a sense of what it all means. An early essay on how "plastics" when from positive to negative is a good example. I was pleased that he also took on the label of "Caucasian" which I have never understood the reason for. In sympathy with the youngsters who compete in spelling bees at the national level, he wonders what it proves that some can and cannot spell words that hardly anyone knows and which don't spell much like they sound. He also has kind words for the use of "ain't" and what purposes it can serve.

Some of the usual targets take their shots too, such as postmodernists.

Business authors, reporters and leaders will probably not stop blushing for two decades from the unerring rapier of commonsense aimed at their inflated use of language.

There's even a nice look at whether and when adverbs make sense to add.

It was with great relief that I found that he isn't all that comfortable with the grammar police, noting how many times the required constructions look, read and sound awful!

I suspect that this would have been a better book if limited to just one area -- like the current presidential campaign . . . but it's more than rewarding as it is. I hope Professor Nunberg will consider creating something special next year to deepen the points he has made here.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect blend of wit and insight, February 1, 2005

By	D. Sean West (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Like with his first book, The Way We Talk Now, this one is filled with the wit, wisdom and a keen eye for the English language that anyone who listens to NRP's Fresh Air has come to expect from Geoffrey Nunberg. Across the range of politics, business, pop culture and technology he not only has an amazing ability to recognize trends in language, place them in their historical contexts and tease profundity out of them. Nunberg does this in recognizing that words are not just tools which we use to chip out some semblance of meaning from life but rather the words we use work on us as well shaping us as we use them to shape our world.

While I very much enjoyed his first book this one seems to be the stronger of the two. In part this may be because Going Necular represents a more mature Nunberg but also because it pulls from a wider range of material than just his Fresh Air commentaries like his first one did.

My only complaint about this book is the dates that are offered for those pieces which were first Fresh Air commentaries are often inconsistent with there actual dates - at first I thought the differences in the dates might be due to the differences in when they were drafted verses when they aired... but this doesn't seem to be the case since sometimes the dates published in Going Necular are before the actual air date and sometimes they are after. This is only annoying because it seems like such an easy to avoid and consistent error - but admittedly that is a small grievance with an otherwise exceptional book.