Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Liberals

Today as my mom, my brother, and I were heading to Portland's "First Thursday" we were listening to Fresh Air on NPR. Geoff Nunberg was talking about his new book, Talking Right, a linguistic analysis of how the "right" has deftly controlled the political vocabulary. In the bit, they played a commercial from 2004 where an elderly couple is criticizing:

"Those latte-Drinking, sushi-Eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving liberals."

If you are familiar with me and my family, you already know why this is hilarious. We were even coming straight from dinner at a sushi bar when we heard it.

Anyway, I felt like Nunberg had some interesting observations to make. I also think it would be even more interesting to see how the people "in power" have used vocabulary and linguistic influence to garner control throughout world history. But I guess that would have been a little bit beyond the scope of his book. I'm sure there's something like that out there already, I just have to go out and find it.