It's 3 a.m. and someone is texting the White House . . .

[Dennis Baron]

There's a new post on the Web of Language:

It's 3 a.m. and someone is texting the White House . . .

Actually it was only 2:35 a.m. and Barack Obama was texting me, and  
I'm nowhere near the White House, to let me know that he had picked  
Joe Biden as his running mate

Pundits have been making much of Obama's use of hip technology to get  
his message across and to raise money. And even though Republicans  
have web sites, the same pundits have been clucking over John McCain's  
personal reluctance to go digital.

But several hours before Barack texted me, the New York Times told me  
he'd picked Biden for his V.P., so the whole texting thing was neat  
but anticlimactic, plus it woke me up in the middle of the night.

The Obama organization actually sent me two texts – perhaps because  
they didn't want me to go back to sleep just yet, and to make sure  
that I really did get the message, Barack also sent me an email  
himself  in case my texting skills were like those of Sen. McCain (I  
know it's really from Sen. Obama, and not his organization, since it's  
signed Barack, and since I got several more emails from him during the  
daylight hours; it seems he's become my new best friend).

It remains to be seen whether Joe Biden can live down plagiarizing law  
school papers and campaign speeches or calling his new best friend  
Barack "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate." And  
if that wasn't blatant enough, Biden added that Obama was "bright and  
clean and a nice-looking guy."

As far as Biden's technological prowess goes, according to the  
American Association for the Advancement of Science, the new would-be  
Veep is in favor of science and technology, so perhaps that's what  
qualified him to be on the same ticket as the clean and articulate  
Obama, though there doesn't seem to be anything more specific online  
about Biden's own use of digital technology, or his reluctance to use  
it, and the pundits are saying it's Biden's foreign affairs  
experience, not his ability to code or use smiley faces, that did the  
trick...

read the rest of this post, complete with pictures and still more  
biting satire, on 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

http://illinois.edu/goto/debaron

read the Web of Language:
http://illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage







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