Joe Bidens Obama moment, or, I love it when you talk white to me

[Brenda Lester]

I'm from Georgia, and a common compliment there is, "He looks good, smells good." That means he "cleans up real good," which is also a compliment. These are regional expressions, and southern people know that.  I'm sure Biden did not mean clean, as in not dirty. A better word would be polished or refined.  And this "white way"--what happened to standard English? Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a very eloquent, articulate speaker. I never heard any debate on his speeches being white-speak.





Dennis Baron <debaron at UIUC.EDU> wrote:
  There's a new post on the Web of Language --

Joe Biden’s Obama moment, or, I love it when you talk white to me.
When Joe Biden characterized Barack Obama to the New York Observer as
“the first mainstream African-American who is articulate,” he
revealed the kind of linguistic prejudice that too often passes for
acceptable in white America. Biden made this remark about his Senate
colleague in an interview in which he disparaged his other rivals for
the Democratic presidential nomination as having a position on Iraq
that is “nothing but disaster” (Hillary Clinton) and not knowing
“what the heck he’s talking about” (John Edwards). Calling Obama
well-spoken as well as “bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”
didn’t seem so bad in comparison. But it was the Obama moment, not
the other insults, that threatened to derail Biden’s candidacy,
because it revealed an insensitivity both subtler and in some ways
more pernicious than Virginia Senator George Allen’s use of macaca,
an overt slur which contributed to Allen’s defeat in the last
election. ... Sen. Biden and many other mainstream Americans all too
frequently assume as well that the right way is the white way....

Read the rest at the Web of Language



DB


Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

www.uiuc.edu/goto/debaron

read the Web of Language:
www.uiuc.edu/goto/weboflanguage

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



---------------------------------
The fish are biting.
 Get more visitors on your site using Yahoo! Search Marketing.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org