(Cross posted at Blog for Cambridge)
The Boston Globe’s headline for the story on last night’s primary is “Democrat voters cast ballots in Gardner area, Somerville”.
The grammatically correct headline is “Democratic voters cast ballots in Gardner area, Somerville”.
I know this may seem like small potatoes, but not even the conservative media machine should be allowed to erase the rules of grammar. Conservatives have, over the past several years, waged an under-the-radar battle to get media and politicians to use Democrat as both an adjective as a noun.
The reason? They want to convince people that Democrats are not small-d democratic. The facts are plainly otherwise: Democrats are far more democratic than Republicans are, and when it comes time to debate policy or to take campaign donations bribes, Republicans are quite straightforward about their authoritarian bent.
I’m sending the Globe a friendly reminder that people who vote for Democrats are Democratic. Drop them a line too: http://www.boston.com/help/feedback/.
Democrat is the noun, Democratic is the adjective.
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The Republicans did some polls that showed that people react more positively to “democratic” than they do to “democrat” used as an adjective. I’m not sure what the reasons are and I don’t think the Republicans cared, either. Maybe it’s just that “democrat” makes people think “rat”? Who knows.
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Bush has been careful to use “Democrat” as an adjective when he’s in red or swing areas, while still using “Democratic” when he’s in more Democratic-leaning areas – presumably to stay on their good side. It’s definitely intentional, and based on polling.
someone put together a collection of video clips of Bush in red states and Bush in blue states – it was amazing how consistent he was about talking about the “Democrat party” in the former and the “Democratic party” in the latter. No doubt that it is intentional.
I seem to recall this starting with Bob Dole, who used to talk about “Democrat wars”.
The Boston Globe told me it’s not their fault, since the headline came from the AP.
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You can email the AP at info (at) ap (dot) org.
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Incidentally, a quick check of their RSS feed shows that the AP does not consistently use “Democratic”.
but I wonder whether the Globe always uses AP’s headlines, or whether their own headline writers do it.
Perhaps we should return the favor and deem them “Republicists.”
the 2001 AP stylebook doesn’t specify how to use Democrat in a hed. I don’t know if they’ve changed their policy since then, but I doubt it.
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Use the grammar argument, it holds more weight and shames any serious news outlet far better than any political argument.
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reporting from the bunkers,