Team Sanchez Ponders What It Means To Be Hispanic

Given that language and politics are so linked, it’s remarkable that linguists and political professionals rarely mingle. So when George Lakoff, a Berkeley linguist, traveled to Austin for a day-long meeting with Democratic political consultants back in August, he was anxious. "I’m the novice," he said at the time. "They know their candidate, they’ve been around for years." Lakoff was being a little demure–it was hardly his first foray into electoral politics and public affairs. Lakoff’s no stranger to rhetorical battles, either; he survived fierce infighting among linguists in the late 1960s and 1970s; he later helped shape a popular discipline called cognitive linguistics. And his 1996 book, Moral Politics, applies cognitive linguistics to the political world.

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