GOFFSTOWN, N.H. - In Rockford, Ill., not long ago, Mitt Romney sought to convey his feelings for his wife, Ann. "Smitten," he said.
Not merely in love. "Mitt was smitten," he said.
It was a classic Mittism, as friends and advisers call the verbal quirks of the Republican presidential candidate. In Romneyspeak, passengers do not get off airplanes, they "disembark." People do not laugh, they "guffaw." Criminals do not go to jail, they land in the "big house." Insults are not hurled, "brickbats" are.
As he seeks the office of commander in chief, Romney can sometimes seem like an editor-in-chief, employing a language all his own. It is polite, formal and at times anachronistic, linguistically setting apart a man who frequently struggles to sell himself to the U.S. electorate.
It is most pronounced when he is on the stump and off the cuff. But Romney offered voters a dose of it last week when he coined the infelicitous phrase "binders full of women."
His style of speaking has distinguished him throughout his career, influencing the word choices of those who work with and especially for him. Should he reach the White House, friends and advisers concede, the trait could be a defining feature of his public image, as memorable as Lyndon B. Johnson's foul-mouthed utterances or the first President George Bush's tortured syntax.
Romney, 65, has spent four decades inside the corridors of high finance and state politics, where indecorous diction and vulgarisms abound. But he has emerged as if in a rhetorical time capsule from a well-mannered era of soda fountains, someone whose idea of swearing is to let loose with the phrase "H-E-double hockey sticks."
"He actually said that," said Thomas Finneran, the speaker of the Massachusetts House when Romney was governor. "I would think to myself, 'Who talks like that?'"