WHEN GEORGE W.BUSH leaves office, the war will finally come to an end. For years the President has struggled, locked in mortal combat, determined to crush and destroy an enemy that his father confronted before him. At times, Bush seemed weighed down by the conflict, but he never gave up the fight. This war was personal.

I refer, of course, to George W. Bush's single-handed and brutal battle with the English language.

No leader of modern times (with the possible exception of John Prescott) has attacked the language with such sustained violence. No other politician can match Bush's ability to mangle syntax and sense into surreal shapes. Even quite simple sentences found themselves remoulded into Byzantine complexity in the passage from Bush's brain to his mouth.

Malapropisms, neologisms, spoonerisms, mispronunciations and other verbal exotica poured out of the President in torrents. Rogue nouns would suddenly wander into his sentences and refuse to leave. Verbs, prepositions, tenses were locked in permanent conflict.

Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate magazine, began collecting these “Bushisms” at the start of the Bush Administration, and has since published no less than six volumes of the President's verbal gaffes, selling more than half a million copies and almost as many calendars.

Covering Bush's campaign in 2000 was often an exercise in approximate translation. I was privileged to be present in Iowa when Bush told an audience: “It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mential losses.” I still have no idea what he meant, but the word has entered my family's lexicon: a “mential loss” is what happens whenever anyone says something particularly idiotic, or mislays the car keys.

Bush's refashioning of the language might be incomprehensible, but it also had a sort of accidental, internal poetry. An enterprising schoolteacher, Dirk Schulze, welded together some of Bush's more famously peculiar phrases to create an entire poem:

Rarely is the question asked:

“Is our children learning?”
Will the Highways of the Internet become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?

Occasionally, Bush can get stuck in his own circular grammar, producing a mellifluous if meaningless rap: “When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they're there.”

This is reminiscent of Donald Rumsfeld, the acknowledged master of inadvertent existential poetry:

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.

Opinion has long been divided over whether Bush's inarticulacy is natural or partly feigned, the mark of an honest Texan with no time for fancy talk, or evidence of mental (and possibly mential) confusion.

Sometimes Bush's linguistic slips brought out a hidden truth. He once declared that racial quotas tended to “vulcanise society”. He meant to say “Balkanise”, of course, but the malapropism probably more nearly captured what he meant: vulcanisation (after Vulcan, the Roman God of fire) is the process whereby rubber is cured with sulphur or other chemicals to create an artificial substance that is harder, denser and insoluble. A society divided by race is truly vulcanised.

Weisberg himself admits that “Bushisms give a misimpression of Bush; and the misimpression is they make him sound like he's dumb.” Bush is careless of the way he speaks, he reaches for long words and then falls over them, but this is very far from a sign of stupidity. In Weisberg's words: “He has some particular kinds of intelligence that serve him very well. He has a strong interpersonal intelligence in that he reads people very quickly and very well.” Many Americans came to relish his unique way with words.

Bush became adept at mocking his own inarticulacy. One never knew where the language might take him, and nor did he. I remember after one particularly baffling extemporised speech, when Bush passed the press corps he simply grinned and asked: “Bumble though OK?”

In part, Bush's language is inherited, for his father was prone to the same linguistic chaos. The former President startled a group of foreign tourists in 1992 by attempting to begin a conversation with the words “Hey, hey, nihaoma. Hey, yeah, yeah. Heil, heil-a kind of Hitler salute.” Nihaoma is Mandarin for “How are you?” The rest is untranslatable.

In the end, Bush's numerous assaults on the English language did no harm, which cannot be said of his other battles.

At a rally in Oregon recently, President Bush declared: “I hope you leave here and walk out and say: ‘What did he say?'”.

Of the epitaphs on the Bush era, “What did he say?” will be among the kindest.

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