Monday, May 24, 2010

what influences common word usage?

DailyKos is a liberal blog community devoted and acclaimed for speaking about liberal issues and opening conversation to those who choose to join. In recent books, Geoffrey Nunberg has articulated how the rhetoric of the right has taken hold of common discourse about politics. This paper looks at a liberal political blog community to show how their discourse coincides with Nunberg’s thesis, DailyKos members use common political terms created by Conservatives to begin their liberal conversation in the political blog community. Administrators of DailyKos also use common Conservative terminology to build a community of liberals within the DailyKos site. This paper will analyze the discourse of the site to show how these terms are used unconsciously, but how they function to build group identity within the space, while reifying the Conservative meanings of terms like “health reform” and “values.”