printNow a Fox-News hire, the boring, liberal mediacrat Howard Kurtz had a go at MSNBC’s Martin Bashir. Barking-mad Bashir, an English import, swore at Sarah Palin on air.
Kurtz is as inspiring as the rest of the banal bobbing heads on the network. He uses a fancy, French word like “denouement,” but can’t conjugate a good old English verb: “lie,” as in “lie down.”
“You might think a mayor might lay low for awhile after admitting to smoking crack … blah blah,” wrote Kurtz of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford.
Conjugate the verb “to lie,” dammit! It’s “lie low,” not “lay low,” stupid!
Repeat after me, Howard: “I am lying low. I lay low yesterday. I had once lain low after making another grammatical faux pas. And, for the same reason, I will lie low in the future.”
Still worse was Kurtz’ pathetic condemnation of Palin for “likening government borrowing to the awful legacy of buying and selling African-Americans”:
Now the issue on which [Bashir] went after the former Alaska governor and Fox News contributor is fair game. Palin had spoken in Iowa of borrowing from China to pay for the national debt, saying: “This isn’t racist. But it’s going to be like slavery when that note is due.”
Palin used a perfectly good noun—slavery—to denote the bondage that trillions in government debt imposes on citizens.
Any opinion writer worth his salt would have rejected the idea that certain eternally aggrieved groups can stake out exclusive linguistic rights to words in our language.