Joe Wilson is idiot, Gandalf

Interesting point on the Joe Wilson matter from Language Log, a very good linguistics blog I read. A significant fact is that Wilson yelled out "You lie!" instead of what almost every other English speaker today would yell in the same situation, "You're lying!"

However many Americans were moved to tax the President with dishonesty as they listend to the speech, it's a safe bet they expressed themselves the way Limbaugh did, in the present progressive — "You're lying." Whereas what Wilson said was "you lie," revisting a use of the simple present that parted ways with ordinary conversational English a couple of centuries ago.

I don't mean to suggest that Wilson's effusion was planned, but it's hard to believe it was unrehearsed: it has the sound of something he had imagined himself saying to the President in numerous idle reveries, maybe as he struck a heroic pose drawn from his recreational reading.

And it's true, that's actually exactly what I thought when I heard about the outburst - he has probably stood in front of a mirror in his underwear or worse, fantasizing about the time he gets to accuse that uppity negro, preferably in a very dramatic-sounding way.

What a douche.