“Words, words, words, I’m so sick of words”

Eliza Doolittle, in My Fair Lady, sang the words of my title.  I thought of this when I listened to Jeff Nunnberg, NPR’s resident linguist, tout his book opining that the Right uses language better and that’s why conservatives are defeating liberals in the marketplace of ideas. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that words without ideas behind them are just clever liberal bumperstickers.  Maybe conservatives are winning, not because of their catch-phrases, but because the catch phrases actually mesh with reality.