Obama's sidiolect put down by a white yet again

[Wilson Gray]

On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 9:18 PM, Ben Zimmer
<bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Obama's sidiolect put down by a white yet again
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 7:16 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 5:04 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>> > Wow! I never guessed Sarah Palin was black!
>>
>> She's probably not. Of course, youneverknow.
>>
>> But the point would be that, in her case, "g-drop" isn't said by even
>> the most left-wing, "socialist" political pundit to be just some
>> linguistic bullshit that she sometime fakes in those desparate moments
>> when politics requires her to make herself *appear* to be of the
>> now-disenfranchised, white masses and to obscure the fact that she's
>> really of the enfranchised-since-George-Washington elite.
>
> From the conservative end of the pundit spectrum, here's Peggy Noonan
> in an Oct. '08 opinion piece for the WSJ, "Palin's Failin'":
>
> ---
> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122419210832542317.html
> More than ever on the campaign trail, the candidates are dropping
> their G's. Hardworkin' families are strainin' and tryin'a get ahead.
> It's not only Sarah Palin but Mr. McCain, too, occasionally Mr. Obama,
> and, of course, George W. Bush when he darts out like the bird in a
> cuckoo clock to tell us we are in crisis. All of the candidates say
> "mom and dad": "our moms and dads who are struggling." This is Mr.
> Bush's former communications adviser Karen Hughes's contribution to
> our democratic life, that you cannot speak like an adult in politics
> now, that's too austere and detached, snobby. No one can say mothers
> and fathers, it's all now the faux down-home, patronizing—and
> infantilizing—moms and dads. Do politicians ever remember that in a
> nation obsessed with politics, our children—sorry, our kids—look to
> political figures for a model as to how adults sound?
> ---
>
> Discussed by Mr. Verb at the time:
>
> http://mr-verb.blogspot.com/2008/10/peggy-noonan-on-political-speech-and-g.html
>
> And plenty more in the Language Log archives on tactical g-dropping by
> a variety of politicians (including Palin):
>
> http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3193
> + links therein
>
> --bgz
>
> --
> Ben Zimmer
> http://benzimmer.com/
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

Wow. How could I have missed all of that? Perhaps I should have
researched any assertions that I make WRT assumptions about trivial
aspects of a personality now no longer in the news and not attempting
to retain the presidency *before* I post, at least to the extent that
columnists and writers for the New York Times do before they publish,
given that my work, reflecting my unbiased opinion, influences the
attitudes of millions of people across the country and around the
world, especially when all of the counter-evidence is utterly beside
the point that I was attempting to make.

Evidence that I've been totally misconstruing the apparent evidence of
underlying racism that leads many people, for no otherwise-obvious
reason, to publish, on line and in print, "evidence" of Obama's
"phoniness" as made minifest by his "faked" attempts to get down with
the lower orders by "pretending" that he speaks their dialect, OTOH,
would have forced me to make an agonizing reappraisal.

Speaking of "agonizing reappraisals," Iove recently heard a black man
spinning a yarn and, therefore, not likely to have been monitoring his
speech so as not to offend any white people within earshot, say,
apparently because it's simply the way that he normally talks, say,

"He swam the Mekong River and _never_ got wet!"

Oh, well.

Youneverknow.

Nothing is forever.

-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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