Quote of the Day (Tocqueville, on Bombastic and Vulgar Speech)

“Americans, who generally treat affairs in a clear and dry language deprived of every ornament, whose extreme simplicity is often vulgar, willingly run to bombast when they want to enter into poetic style. Then they show themselves relentlessly pompous from one end of the speech to the other, and to see them thus squander images at every turn one would believe that they have never said anything simply.”—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume Two, Part One, Chapter 18, translated and edited by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop

(Tocqueville’s analysis of “bombast” clearly anticipated more than a century of bloviation at political conventions. But, in writing briefly of “extreme simplicity” that is “often vulgar,” he appears to have anticipated Fred Thompson, who told Republican Convention delegates that Sarah Palin is “the only candidate who knows how to field-dress a moose.” Whatever else one might say, pro or con, about her, I’m not sure that this is one image that voters are going to want to take to the polls this November. Tell me, faithful reader, have YOU ever “field-dressed” a mouse? Do you WANT to? I’m not even sure I want to know what it is!)