Ah, Newt Gingrich, the latest not-Romney and someone new to have some fun with! Andrew Sullivan, for example, has invented a drinking game: while watching the Republican presidential candidates debate, everyone has a shot each time Newt says "frank/frankly, profound/profoundly, total/totally, utter/utterly, or complete/completely." That'll land you somewhere you might not want to be on the morning after. Newt's verbal tics are as indefatigable as his self-regard. In "The Teachings of Speaker Gingrich," published sixteen years ago in The New York Review of Books, Joan Didion quotes the following representative specimen of a Gingrichean speech act: "I teach a course which is an outline of my thoughts at 51 years of age, based on everything I've experienced, which is, frankly, rather more than most tenured faculty."
Didion's essay begins with a list--Newt himself loves lists as well as outlines--of some of the "personalities and books and events that have 'influenced' or 'changed' or 'left an indelible impression on' [Newt's] thoughts." She sets them down in the manner of a Homeric catalog:
Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt, Isaac Asimov, Alexis de Tocqueville, Tom Clancy, Allen Drury's Advise and Consent, Robert Walpole, William Gladstone, Gordon Wood, Peter Drucker, Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, the "Two Cultures" lectures of C.P. Snow, Adam Smith, Zen and the Art of Archery, "the great leader of Coca-Cola for many years, Woodruff," an Omaha entrepreneur named Herman Cain ("who's the head of Godfather Pizza, he's an African American who was born in Atlanta and his father was Woodruff's chauffeur"), Ray Kroc's Grinding It Out, and Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages.
There are also. . . .
You get the idea. Gee! Whiz! He's a genius! You also have to love Herman Cain's cameo, and how way back then he required parenthetic identification. Republicans don't like affirmative action, but you can always count on them to mention that there's this black guy they admire. His dad used to drive around rich white guys in a limo! And now look at him! He doesn't know where Libya is!
When discussing Newt, you find yourself using a lot of exclamation points. It's the punctuation mark that goes with his puffy style. Totally!
