Gosh, who talks like that anymore? Romney does

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?'"

Romney, quite proudly. In fact, he seems puzzled by the fascination with it. "It's like someone who speaks with an accent," he said. "You don't hear the accent."

His Mormon faith frowns on salty language, and so does he. A man of relentless self-discipline, he made clear to lawmakers in Boston and colleagues in business that even in matters of vocabulary, he "held himself to a high standard of behavior," said Geoffrey Rehnert, a former executive at Bain Capital, the firm Romney started in the 1980s. Romney's father, George, whom he idolized, shared the same style of refined and restrained speech.

For Democratic strategists, Romney's throwback vocabulary feeds into their portrayal of a man ill-equipped for the mores and challenges of the modern age. David Axelrod, a top adviser for the Obama campaign, once quipped that Romney "must watch 'Mad Men,'" the TV show set in the 1960s, "and think it's the evening news."

His exclamations can sound jarring to the contemporary ear -- or charming, depending on whom you ask. He does have his own distinctly G-rated arsenal of angry expressions -- "flippin'," "good heavens" and even the occasional "crap."

Perhaps the most intriguing of these is "grunt." Most people just grunt. Romney, however, talks about grunting. "Grunt" he says, onomatopoetically, when annoyed with a change in his schedule.

Those around him are so accustomed to his verbal tics that they describe them in shorthand. "Old-timey," said one aide. "His 1950s language," explained another. "The Gomer Pyle routine," said a third. Asked about his boss' word preferences, Eric Fehrnstrom, a veteran Romney adviser, responded knowingly: "You mean like 'gosh, golly, darn'?"