On Being Fodder for Offenders

(Article changed on October 11, 2012 at 15:31)

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Language changes like a river, and now we have another new ripple.  Except it isn't new.  I'm referring to using a noun to modify another noun -- when the modifying noun is Democrat.  I'm sure you've seen or heard it, as in: 

The Democrat party, or

A Democrat senator

The first time I registered this grammatical abomination was in a remark by George W. Bush during his presidency (so I simply ascribed it to ignorance), but a bit of digging reveals that the epithet has been in use since at least the 1940s in Wendell Wilkie's failed presidential campaign.  

These days, use of the slur appears to be rampant.    Right-wing talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh uses the term promiscuously.  Many conservative Republicans, including House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Speaker of the House John Boehner, and a host of Congressional Republicans, use the term liberally (no pun intended).  More tellingly, the noun-as-adjective has occurred in most GOP platforms since 1948. 

In fact placing a noun in front of an adjective is not always wrong.  We do it routinely to form compound nouns such as "copy machine", "food activist", and "peace (or bowel) movement". 

But the political entity I'm talking about is named the Democratic Party and to remove the suffix is not only to misuse, but also deliberately to disparage, the party and hence its constituents.  As House Representative Marty Kaptur reprimanded Representative Jeb Hensarling after he, in questioning Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag, repeatedly used the epithet:

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