The Voices of Obama

by publius

Via Ezra, I saw this Zadie Smith essay praising the multiple voices of Obama – voices on full display in Dreams from My Father.  I’ll admit to skimming the essay in places, but one upshot is that Obama doesn’t have one “true” authentic voice.  He has many – and that’s a good thing, especially for the president of the U.S. of A.  Smith explains:

We [British] feel that our voices [dialects/accents] are who we are, and that to have more than one, or to use different versions of a voice for different occasions, represents, at best, a Janus-faced duplicity, and at worst, the loss of our very souls….

This new president doesn't just speak for his people. He can speak them. It is a disorienting talent in a president; we're so unused to it….

The tale he tells is not the old tragedy of gaining a new, false voice at the expense of a true one. The tale he tells is all about addition. His is the story of a genuinely many-voiced man. If it has a moral it is that each man must be true to his selves, plural….

I enjoyed this narrative for a couple of reasons.  First, because it makes Obama seem cool.  Second, because it’s very self-serving for me.  I rolled into college with a thick rural Kentucky accent – one that resurfaces in faint flashes today, but is otherwise a long time gone.  I’ve hated, mourned, and celebrated that accent at different points in my life.  And even today, I feel vaguely like a class traitor whenever I say “soda” instead of “coke.” 

It’s much easier, then, to think of my new accent – my second language – as an addition rather than a replacement.  So I’ll just go with that.

But navel-gazing aside, I think Smith is overestimating the extent that Obama’s multiple voices are all that new for a president.  His background is unique as presidents go, but one of the most interesting aspects of successful politicians (particularly presidents) is their ability to speak in multiple voices – to exist in the plural, as Smith phrases it.  And that skill is not something to be cynical about – it’s some to be in awe of.

Clinton is a great example – that guy was arguably even more “plural” than Obama.  He was raised dirt poor in Nowhere, Arkansas.  He managed to get from there to Yale Law to Oxford back to Little Rock and then on to DC. 

Whatever else you think about him, it’s an impressive feat.  And along the way, he learned to speak in multiple voices – to exist in the plural.  Clinton grew up with working-class and poor whites.  For that reason, he could walk into a Southern BBQ in any small town and fit right in.  He could then hop on a plane and dine with Princeton economists that very night – and fit right in. 

He also showed the ability to appeal to multiple constituencies -- he inspired and motivated liberals, while simultaneously winning the votes of conservatives.  Racial justice was a priority for him – but one he managed to pursue while coming to power in a deep South state.  It’s easy to dismiss all this as Slick Willie playing to the crowd – the truth, however, is simply that he was (and is) a complex man, not easily reduced to one voice.

It’s something all presidents must be able to do.  Even Bush was quite good at it – despite his notable lack of obstacles to wealth and power.  The hard part about winning a Republican primary is appealing to the various diverse constituencies – especially the business types and the social conservatives.  Bush, however, could do both.  He’s, um, not much of a policy guy.  But he was a good politician in this respect because he too was “plural.”  He could appeal to both groups because he was both groups.

We all devote a lot of pixels to criticizing politicians – and that’s as it should be.  But it’s worth stepping back at times to admire just how hard it is to do politics well.

Comments

[OCSteve]

Some folks call "multiple voices" hypocrisy. ;) Adjusting your remarks, your tone, even your dialect to the audience – when made public it doesn’t play well to other audiences. Think “clinging”… It’s the age old issue of politicians telling us commoners what we want to hear, and telling a different group what they want to hear.

I agree that Bill Clinton is a master of the art. SecState – not so much.

[OCSteve]

The voice I‘m watching on Jay Leno seems just like anyone else going on that show that has something to sell (that not many folks want to buy)…

Really? POTUS should use late night TV to get his message out?

He’s trying too hard and his pants ride way up his legs. Didn’t like the tie either… (Yes I’m being a d*ck – just first impressions watching it now.)

A few minutes later – OK, he’s coming off very casual. I like it better.

Leno seems in awe. OK, yeah, if you land this interview you are Golden. Leno is not thinking anything but “Ka-Ching”.

[liberal japonicus]

Some folks call "multiple voices" hypocrisy.

Not directed at you, OC, but people like that are people who often have a mistaken belief that they always present the same face to everyone all the time. Or are using this, which makes it even more hypocritical. You can see this in the way some use this to excuse the way they behave ('Hey, I can't help it, that's just the way I am') and how others use it as a way of trying to score points.

What strikes me is that that ability to behave appropriately given the situation is something that is a bedrock of conservatism. Invoking it (a la Frank Sinatra taking exception to Harlan Ellison's footwear) is the way that social strata are reinforced. The two extremes of changing that, either claiming that it is irrelevant or being able to codeswitch accurately and appropriately, Obama adopts the latter.

[Gary Farber]

"Adjusting your remarks, your tone, even your dialect to the audience – when made public it doesn’t play well to other audiences"

Since this is the entire point of Smith's essay, it's clear you haven't read it. Try reading it.

[...] Right up to the wire, Obama made many black men and women of Jackson's generation suspicious. How can the man who passes between culturally black and white voices with such flexibility, with such ease, be an honest man? How will the man from Dream City keep it real? Why won't he speak with a clear and unified voice?

You also should read Dreams From My Father, too. Everyone should.

[publius]

even better, listen on audiobook! obama does all these voices himself.

[OCSteve]

“If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”

OK – he did well. Sucked me in by the end.

I ain’t buying what he’s selling – but he came off very well.

[OCSteve]

LJ: Not directed at you, OC, but people like that are people who often have a mistaken belief that they always present the same face to everyone all the time.

Direct it at me if you like – because I don’t understand that. You believe what you believe and you are consistent no matter the subject or the audience. You don’t say A here and B there…

Gary:it's clear you haven't read it. Try reading it.

Mind reading foul dude. Could be I read it and disagree with the premise?

[Gary Farber]

"Could be I read it and disagree with the premise?"

If you disagreed with the premise, you'd engage with the premise, rather than with some imaginary version. If you'd like to argue with what she wrote, go for it.

[gwangung]

Direct it at me if you like – because I don’t understand that. You believe what you believe and you are consistent no matter the subject or the audience. You don’t say A here and B there…

Quite a few minorities believe that you HAVE to do that if you're going to succeed. You know, all the successful types....

[Josh]

You believe what you believe and you are consistent no matter the subject or the audience. You don’t say A here and B there…

So you use the exact speech mannerisms when talking with your family as you do in a formal environment with people you've never met before? I don't believe you.

[gwangung]

Not directed at you, OC, but people like that are people who often have a mistaken belief that they always present the same face to everyone all the time.

Someone who does this is a terrible leader and a terrible manager of a diverse work group. Having multiple voices means not just having different mannerisms or speech patters for different people, but understanding what's important for each group and what they value. And they SHOW people (not just tell them) that they understand by speaking with those different voices and different styles.

[hilzoy]

OCSteve: I think there's a big difference between saying different things to different people and adjusting how you say it to fit your audience. I've read the Zadie Smith piece, and it's really about the latter -- though for her it's not just about accents; you need to be able to understand both sets of people to pull it off.

What I was thinking about, when I was reading publius' post, was the time I worked in a biker bar in Tucson. At the time, I was working towards my PhD in philosophy at Harvard. Moreover, I had to disclose that on my employment application -- it was the sort of place where gaps of several years on your resume would normally be taken to indicate jail time, so I couldn't just omit it. (Or so I thought; in fact, jail time was not an obstacle to getting a job there. Who knew?)

Now: being a Harvard philosophy grad student is a social handicap outside academia. (I'm not complaining about it, but it is.) Sometimes people think you must be awfully full of yourself, and try to knock you off what they assume is your high horse. Sometimes they think maybe you're right to look down on them, and that's awful in a different way. Sometimes they think you must spend all your time thinking very very deep thoughts, and if that idea doesn't strike them mute, they often try to come up with what they think are deep thoughts of their own (since this is what you supposedly like; they're trying to be personable), and these "deep thoughts" are inevitably much less interesting than, you know, their actual thoughts. And all of this before they actually get to know you.

With that as background, consider me in my biker bar. My co-workers had, at most, a high school education, and often not that. Some were functionally illiterate. I really liked most of them, but I was also aware that to most of them, I was some sort of space alien. So I did what I normally do in such circumstances, namely try to be nice and decent, and work very hard, and keep my head down.

But I also changed the way I talked. Not my accent, but things like: my vocabulary, which became much more stripped down; allusions to books, which I tried to excise entirely; and so on. Not what I said or who I was; just the way I said it. And the reason was that using words like 'deficit spending' or 'premise' was -- well, worse than speaking a foreign language, since if you're just a foreigner, people tend to indulge the fact that you say things they don't understand; they don't tend to take it as a sign that you think you're all superior. Which I didn't: I imagine I am better at philosophy than they are, but that doesn't seem to me to be a particularly important metric by which to evaluate people.

Basically, I just wanted to get to a point where I could either be liked or disliked on my own merits, by a group of people I very much liked, and moreover had to work with. But that took work.

I don't think I was being hypocritical. At least, I hope not. I tried to be aware of the possibility that I was underestimating people's vocabulary, etc., but in practice, I kept discovering new bits of the way I talked that were highly dependent on having read a lot, or things I thought I could safely refer to that it turned out I couldn't. (True story: someone was telling me how odd something was, and how unlike wherever he was from. I said: well, Toto, we're not in Kansas any more. He said: oh, are you from Kansas? -- I had thought that the Wizard of Oz was safe. Apparently, I was wrong.)

I learned a lot from this, above and beyond what I learned from my co-workers.

[Tony P.]

Hilzoy, are you telling us you were the inspiration for the character of Diane on Cheers?!?

Kidding aside, I do admire people who speak multiple languages well, even if they're all variants of English. Some might consider a person who speaks French to Parisians, Russian to Muscovites, and so on to be ethically suspect for using different languages to connect with different audiences. I don't see the logic of that objection, myself. If I did, I might agree with OCSteve's original comment:)

--TP

[Linkmeister]

When I was in the Navy in 1973 I nearly had a fistfight with a fellow sailor because he felt that I (with two-plus years of college) and another guy (also with some college) were "talking down" to him by using language he didn't recognize. It wasn't anything special, just words we were accustomed to using in classes, but that set him off.

It was quite a lesson in how language can be twisted.

[liberal japonicus]

OC, when I speak Japanese, I have to change _everything_. The way I make eye contact, the way I raise points, how I introduce objections, the list goes on and on. You might say, well, you chose to go to Japan, so I should sleep in the bed I made. But when you think of a minority in the US, they get caught in the Scylla of 'be yourself' and the Charbydis of 'fit in'. Be it minorities in majority society or women in a men's world, that inability to accept that a person might have two or more voices translates, even without intention, as a way for the majority to always keep the minority down. The confrontational way to deal with that is to boldly assert that your norms are as valid as the norms the majority group is holding to. 'We're here, get used to it.' Unfortunately, this can end up simply inverting the situation, because this strategy only works if there is a large enough group to support the minority norms, and it is easy for the assertion of those norms to play out as a claim that they are superior to the majority norms.

Hilzoy's example is played out all the time where people with an academic background end up in situations like the biker bar. I did a summer stint at a factory and the same thing applied, but Obama's life story helps us understand why he does it and why he is so good at it and why it may get closer to who he really is. His experiences, elementary schooling in Indonesia, prep school at Punahoa, working as a community organizer in Chicago and then to Harvard Law School, are all ones where one doesn't assert one's own personal norm is to be followed over the majority norms, so it follows that an important part of his personality is the ability mentioned in the article. And given that society is becoming more fluid rather than less, it seems like this is the path for the future.

[laxel]

It's not very surprising that a politician would work at this, for many of the reasons Publius points out, even if it is surprising how gifted Obama is at it.

OCSteve, to personalize Obama's adjustments, it might be useful to think about what recent political organizing (as a method to achieve a goal or set of goals) looks like at the lower levels.

Imagine that you sincerely wanted something to happen within the governmental/electoral sphere, something you felt would improve your life, and the lives of those in your community. You want to be effective at raising awareness and influencing people to support what you support. So you decide to canvass neighborhoods or phone bank, for example, with the conviction that what you are doing is proper.

Now this is only my experience, but I've found it helps to adjust on the fly, trailer parks or mansions on the hill, single mothers or veterans, doctors or dogcatchers... figure out who you are dealing with and work to get them to understand why they should care about what you care about. It doesn't require talking in a fake accent, or making stereotypical judgments and calculations about people based on appearances or demographics, just trying to be the best representative of your cause, and trying to honestly deliver it to a brand new crowd door after door. If that requires a little lingual overhaul, so be it, it seems pretty natural when your actually talking to people face to face.

"and these "deep thoughts" are inevitably much less interesting than, you know, their actual thoughts."

That's a good observation.

Deep thought: If having a huge vocabulary was what made people smart, surely the Inuit, who have sixteen billion words just for the word 'snow', would have taken over the world by now.

[Gary Farber]

"the Inuit, who have sixteen billion words just for the word 'snow',"

That certainly would be astounding.

[Jesurgislac]

laxel: If having a huge vocabulary was what made people smart, surely the Inuit, who have sixteen billion words just for the word 'snow', would have taken over the world by now.

Actually, every part of the claim that "the Inuit have N words for snow" is wrong: (1) It's like claiming "the Europeans have X words for wine" - there is no one "Inuit" language any more than there is one "European" language (despite what the French would say) (2) Aleut and Inuit languages are polysynthetic and agglutinative, so that counting up "words" is problematic; and (3) what exactly do we mean by "a word for snow"?

OCSteve's claim that honest people are always the same in all circumstances is an argument of pure unthinking privilege: white straight middle-class men can seldom have had the need to fit themselves into a different social niche by changing how they speak, so they identify their own right to behave/speak how they "normally" do with honesty - and look with contempt on people who, because they belong to multiple worlds, do indeed change their behavior for each world.

Oh, and beginning a comment with "some people" - good lord. OCSteve, can't you bring yourself to clearly state your own opinion, rather that hiding it under "some people say"...?

[liberal japonicus]

I've told y'all not to exaggerate like a million times...

[AIMAI]

You say "soda?" Man, I grew up saying "Tonic."

I won't bother to break with Obiwi tradition by actually saying what I think of OCSteve's pathetic viewpoint. However I do want to say that Dreams of my Father is an incredibly complex book that reveals a very complex person who has been the product of a multi cultural society from the get go and who has chosen to integrate all those aspects of his own history and his countrys *without arrogance or bitterness or creepy servitude.*

People "code switch" all the time in real life--we talk differently as parents than we do as business people, differently as lovers than we do as parents, differently in school than out, at home than on the range, when we speak french than when we speak chinese. What is delightful and remarkable about Obama is that he does it naturally, fluently, and graciously because of the person he is interacting with. If he speaks black with black people and white with white people that is a gesture that bespeaks his inner confidence that he is both.

I'd contrast that--oh, wait, let me use OCSteve's brilliant locution. "Some people say" that Bush's code switching in which he parodied people's voices while describing (say) his decision to execute them, or dropped into parodic imitations of his enemies, was exactly the opposite. His fluency, such as it was, at switching between a good 'ol boy texan and a harvard educated ct master of the universe, between a weepy evangelical come to jesus type and a fake john wayne reflected not an inner identification with, and comfort with, his interlocutors but was merely an extension of the brutal, war of all against all, that he imagined social life to be. I always found bush's back slapping geniality to be a mere cover for the intense hostility he felt towards, for example, the press corps and the imagined eastern liberal elite.

aimai

[russell]

Some folks call "multiple voices" hypocrisy. ;) Adjusting your remarks, your tone, even your dialect to the audience

Some call it normal.

[hilzoy]

"OCSteve's claim that honest people are always the same in all circumstances is an argument of pure unthinking privilege"

It's also possible to interpret it as based on a misunderstanding: that Smith was talking about changing what you say, not how you say it; and more specifically, not just changing the topics you discuss in some normal way (I didn't talk a lot about metaethics in the biker bar), but what your views are.

[(The Original) Francis]

hilzoy: of all the possible employment options available to you, why in the name of the FSM did you choose a Tucson biker bar?

[Eric Martin]

praising the multiple voices of Obama

I think that's just the result of Bill Ayers' ghost writing contributions.

No, seriously. Andrew McCarthy and the National Review said so.

[hilzoy]

Francis: what options? I was broke, and Tucson was in a recession. The biker bar was a vast improvement over my existing job, throwing newspapers.

[Jesurgislac]

Hilzoy: It's also possible to interpret it as based on a misunderstanding; that Smith was talking about changing what you say, not how you say it; and more specifically, not just changing the topics you discuss in some normal way (I didn't talk a lot about metaethics in the biker bar), but what your views are.

*goes back and reads OCSteve*

If OCSteve thought this was about what you say, not how you say it, it's interesting that he should have chosen to identify the multiple voices as "hypocrisy": that he should have pulled out to comment on that adjusting "your tone, even your dialect to the audience" as something that doesn't "play well". But, perhaps OCSteve is just a hopelessly bad writer, and he really didn't mean to say any of the above. Or, perhaps, given his use of "some people say", he was just repeating without critical thought what he'd read he was supposed to think about Barack Obama's skill at public speaking, from some conservative source.

[now_what]

It's also possible to interpret it as based on a misunderstanding: that Smith was talking about changing what you say, not how you say it

OCSteve was very clearly talking about how you say it - "Adjusting your remarks, your tone, even your dialect". Changing your tone or dialect does not change what you say, it changes how you say it.

Personally, I can not imagine talking to my (non-technical) boss in the same dialect as I talk to my (technical) cow-orkers, and I suppose that makes me a hypocrite. So it goes.

[Slartibartfast]

Not arguing any particular point, but I work for a guy who always presents the same face (or voice, as you please) (at least, at work) irrespective of audience. Addressing a bunch of guys at my level, or the mission area director, or some high-level customers, all of that comes off pretty much the same. He may edit what he says, according to audience, but how he says it doesn't seem to vary at all.

At first, this was rather off-putting to me, but after a while, I realized he was just being true to, and comfortable with, himself.

For me, that doesn't work at all. Dunno what that says about me.

[wonkie]

Everyone has more than one voice. There is. for example, the voice you use to express how you really feel when when speaking to somene yo are very comfortable with. The same emotions, expressed to someone outside the circle of intimacy would be expressed differently.

If someone literally used the same voice all the time they would be considered odd in the extreme.

We pick our words, or ought to, as we pick or clothes, choosing the right ones for the ocassion.

Some of us have the experience which allows for speaking in a variety of accents or vocabularies, all athentic to that individual's personal history. This also is OK. Again, it's like clothes. There is I suppose a littel cultural snobbery in the notion that all accents (except the socially acceptable mildly Southern one like Carter's) are considered appropriate for home and family but not for professional settings. Black accents particlularly are not cojsidered appropropriate for professinal settings, except for church or church like meetings.

It's really a facinating thing to get inot---the ins and outs of how our culture feels about accents. The only thing about accents that pisses me off is fakery. I literally could not stand to listen to Bushtwit's sanctimonious imbecilities gussied up as down-homeisms from good ol' Texas.

I had a co-worker once who was sort of tirlingual. She spoke her professional jargon (speech therapist talk), professional Englich ( white Midwestern) and the tongue of her childhodd was urban black South. She could slide easily from one to the other in the course of a parent conference. The balck accent never appeared before a white parent. Everyone was impressed by the professional jargon--one of the uses of professional jargon is to impress people outside the field withone's insider knowledge. Her white voice let white parents be comfortable with her and her black voice did the same for balck parents.

I thnk that the most important aspect of a person's remarks is of course the content--however the voice of the content,l just like the appearance of the speaker, does influence how the message is understood.

[Matt]

The audio of Smith's lecture is available here. It was originally posted as a New York Review of Books podcast, but (strangely) seems to have disappeared from their archives.

It's a superlative reading.

[russell]

I think what OC is saying is that it's hypocritical for Obama to talk to wealthy liberal yuppie supporters in San Francisco about middle and lower middle class people in Pennsylvania clinging to their guns and religion if he is not willing to make the same comments to their (the folks in PA) face.

It's a reasonable point, but it would make a hell of a lot of people hypocrites.

"the Inuit, who have sixteen billion words just for the word 'snow',"

That certainly would be astounding.

One per flake.

[Fraud Guy]

My 2 cents.

I learned about different styles and voices from my French and Spanish classes in high school. These languages, and others, have formal and informal usages (vous v. tu, e.g.); I was tought never to consider using the informal with your teacher, but that it was appropriate with friends and family. In some cases (IIRC, especially in Spanish), you may even use the formal with family, such as with grandparents you wished to show respect to.

Then I think of the sterotypical character who always treats everyone the same, and I think of the American tourist, who doesn't understand why things and people aren't the same as they are back home.

I guess to me that it is not being true to yourself to not adapt to your audience, but being not considerate of them. If you're not adapting, you're ignoring who they are, and treating yourself as more important, which is fine in a lecture, but not in a dialogue.

[russell]

Among jazz players, one possible appropriate response when someone plays something really, really good is to turn to them and say, 'F*** you!'.

It's a really high compliment, and can only be given between peers.

Context is everything.

[AIMAI]

But its not true that Obama made the "guns and religion" argument to people who weren't clinging to guns and religion and refused to make it to people who were--given the rapid reporting, the fact that he gave speeches on similar subjects at every whistle stop, and that he wasn't insulting anyone by making the perfectly obvious observation it simply doesn't stand as a good example of hypocritical political narrowcasting. It was never the same kind of remark as, say, saying "Buffallo is my favorite city!" right before flying to Schenectady and saying the same thing about Schenectady.

I think the right wing rage at any approving discussion of Obama as a communicator lies in their deep and well hidden hatred of Bush's many malapropisms and his tortured use of the language. Despite trying hard to promote the myth of the silent western type speaker, the man of few words, and the untutored rough cowboy I think few of Bush's elite defenders and very few of his base followers really enjoyed the fact that Bush was a noted idiot. The truth is that Bush was rather garrulous, and while running his mouth he routinely made bloopers and idiotic statements that the White House needed to correct or see deep sixed. IT came out in the middle of the eight years that the New York Times and other publications were always correcting the transcripts of what the President actually said to reflect something more like standard english or standard sense. At the time the far right and its shills, like Peggy Noonan et al, put a damned good game face on it. But I think you can see from the absolutely hysterical excitement with which they seized on the notion that it is *Obama* who doesn't speak good English or *Obama* who needs a minder and a teleprompter that this is a deep psychic wound on the right. Of course they started it up with Kerry--anyone remember how eagerly they tried to project onto Kerry Bush's acknowledged problems (poor grades, poor speaking style, cowardice, failure to fight the war in vietnam). They tried so hard I was surprised they didn't accuse Kerry of having drunken twin daughters.

At any rate you can be sure that we will continue to hear that Obama isn't a good speaker, or that the ways in which he is a good speaker are deceptive and cruel and evil, because it is simply impossible for the right wing to acknowledge any unmitigated good in a democrat.

aimai

[GoodOleBoy]

Do we have an " 'imagined' eastern liberal elite"?

[Brett Bellmore]

"It came out in the middle of the eight years that the New York Times and other publications were always correcting the transcripts of what the President actually said to reflect something more like standard english or standard sense."

In all fairness, while Bush was relatively inarticulate, it is, in fact, standard practice to 'clean up' transcripts, in recognition of the fact that extemporanious spoken English looks terrible when compared to carefully drafted written English. You know the press have got it in for somebody when they DON'T clean up a transcript.

[russell]

Do we have an " 'imagined' eastern liberal elite"?

Probably not.

Do we have 'imagined' ignorant low-information dumb@sses?

[GoodOleBoy]

I know some real actual eastern liberal elites that I could couple with the imagined cohort. Russell, maybe you could do that with your class of ignorant low-information dumb@sses.

[gwangung]

Do we have an " 'imagined' eastern liberal elite"?

Sure. Lots of easterners who think they're elite.

[russell]

Russell, maybe you could do that with your class of ignorant low-information dumb@sses.

Every stereotype contains a grain of truth, and every stereotype is equally useless as a way of thinking about what real, actual people think, do, and say.

[laxel]

"Actually, every part of the claim that "the Inuit have N words for snow" is wrong"

I'm going to have to stand by my claim Jes, after all, I do remember that particular statistic coming right from the mouth of the Professor on Gilligan's Island. And though he did use the word Eskimo (and the figure might only have been fifteen billion) his scientific pedigree is unimpeachable.

It's fun to think about Hilzoy's biker bar in reverse, sort of. Take me, I got a couple of masters degrees and I hang drywall to make a pretty bare bones living (been doing it on and off for about a decade, before during, and after grad school)... a lot of times I show up at a wealthy clients home looking grungy and tired. The homeowner will make small talk, and I'll talk. It depends on the vibe how much I open up, but its nice to be able to shift gears and talk news if the conversations go beyond a formality... If I think I have anything useful to say beyond 'How bout those Detroit Lions?', and the person is generally listening, I might say what's on my mind. The majority of time, I'll leave it alone, play the part of laborer, just so as not to throw peoples' expectations off kilter.

I'd guess that if Hilzoy were working at a biker bar today, she'd come across a lot of wanabee biker fat cats and yuppies who would look down on her for the simple fact that she worked behind a bar, and there'd be a temptation to switch to the Harvard code... but the thing is, no matter how satisfying it might be to set a cocky a-hole straight, it's generally not worth the time. Better to save the sharing of yourself with people who treat you decently. /megaovergeneralization

Fraud Guy, I think you're about the only team I'm ahead of in LGM's tourney extravaganza.

[jrudkis]

Every politician that I have met in person was pretty electric, filled the room, and engaging. It was pretty easy to see how they could win support, almost regardless of their views.

The caracitures that we get of national politicians (like wooden Al Gore or clumsy Ford) are so completely unrealistic compared to what they are really like.

The sound bite culture probably robs us of any real understanding of why or how particular politicians made it to the national stage in the first place.

[GoodOleBoy]

Brett, I appreciate your comment. Most of the commentary relative to Bush's speaking took little account of the traditional difference between spoken and formal written English. Some of his errors, of course, were just personal to him, and some resulted from his attempts to make adjustments to be more acceptably formal (and he would screw that up). Most would have difficulty writing out what 'the cable guy' says but he communicates very effectively. An excellent source for insights is John McWhorter's 'Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue'.

[xanax]

Re (The Original)Francis @9:55 -"hilzoy: of all the possible employment options available to you, why in the name of the FSM did you choose a Tucson biker bar?"

Does this answer your question.

By the way hil, was driving by there the other day and there was a banner out front that read "Come back hilzoy...your shift is open!"

Interested?

[xanax]

Oops.

[AIMAI]

Goodoleboy and Brett's statement that it is absolutely conventional to clean up the transcript and that "commentary relative to Bush's speaking took little account of the traditional difference between spoken and formal written English" is absurd. It goes under the heading of "who are you going to believe, me or your own lying ears." I had to listen to Bush for eight long years. It was an absolute penance to listen to him speak not because of a "traditional diffrence between psoken and formal written English" but because the man was dyslexic, careless, agressively ignorant and socially tone deaf. The speeches that he read off the teleprompter, having been written by actual speechwriters, were pretty good but at any press conference or public event where he went off script he could be counted upon to make major and minor errors of grammar, syntax, word choice or just plain old philosophy. I don't blame him for that. I think its pretty clear that he had a clinical problem like dyslexia which went largely untreated. And he covered for it in a variety of shrewd ways. But please don't bother trying to cover for it for him.

aimai

[Brett Bellmore]

Actually, my statement was that Bush was relatively inarticulate. (Embarassingly so at times.) This doesn't mean that cleaing up transcripts isn't SOP. It just means he took more cleaning up than average.

[Jesurgislac]

GoodOleBoy: Most of the commentary relative to Bush's speaking took little account of the traditional difference between spoken and formal written English.

...no, really not.

Bush was an abso-effin'-lutely bloody lousy public speaker.

Of course, most American politicians are lousy public speakers by British standards, simply because British standards include being able to handle yourself readily at Prime Minister's Questions, on Question Time, and when interviewed by Jeremy Paxman. (I was talking to my dad the other day about the time when George Galloway just wrapped up the US committee that was questioning him and walked off with them under his arm: and Galloway is not an extraordinarily good speaker by British standards.) But, even by American standards, I think anyone but a mindlessly loyal Republican would agree: George W. Bush was craptastic.

[Fraud Guy]

laxel,

When you add d12 to each team's seed and take the lower of the two sums for your choice, that tends to happen.

I don't gamble, I just play the lottery.

[GoodOleBoy]

Aimai, what is an error in philosophy?

[hilzoy]

xanax: that's not the same place, is it? I mean, it's hard to tell from the photo archive, since one white box-shaped stucco building looks a lot like the next. (For the rest of you: mine didn't have music, and would never have had a web page all its own. Far too scuzzy for that.)

And laxel: my next job was tending bar at a place that was trying to attract people with academic aspirations, or something. Part of the reason I was hired was that I could talk about that stuff, if asked. Except for the new place's band, I preferred the biker bar. Conversations with customers at the new place tended to be like some sort of ghastly parody of arts and academic scenes, and it was a job requirement that I participate in them.

[GoodOleBoy]

Russell,

I offer the following on the nature of stereotypes from Steven Pinker in 'The Blank Slate'.

"The idea that stereotypes are inherently irrational owes more to a condescension toward ordinary people than it does to good psychological research. Many researchers, having shown that stereotypes existed in the minds of their subjects, assumed that the stereotypes had to be irrational, because they were uncomfortable with the possibility that some trait might be statistically true of some group. They never actually checked. That began to change in the 1980s, and now a fair amount is known about the accuracy of stereotypes.

With some important exceptions, stereotypes are in fact not inaccurate when assessed against objective benchmarks such as census figures or the reports of the stereotyped people themselves."

There might be more to stereotypes than you think.

[xanax]

Well it was The Bashful Bandit on Speedway, wasn't it?

Does this photo gallery help jog the memory... oh great rememberer?

[Turbulence]

Direct it at me if you like – because I don’t understand that. You believe what you believe and you are consistent no matter the subject or the audience. You don’t say A here and B there…

This makes no sense to me. If you care about effectiveness when communicating, you are going to tailor what you say to different audiences. If I'm talking to peers in my group about another group's massive frack-up, I speak bluntly and offensively since I need to establish how unacceptable their ignorance is. But if I discuss the same incident with people from the group that fraked up, I speak obliquely because there is no reason to antagonize them and reiterating the depths of their stupidity won't help them. Don't you do the same thing? When the big client demands that you do something stupid and asks your opinion, do you give precisely the same answer as you do when a coworker or boss asks you what you think about the client's stupid idea?

[russell]

There might be more to stereotypes than you think.

As you wish.

A couple of brief comments.

I wouldn't say stereotypes are irrational. I'd say they aren't useful.

Regarding this:

The idea that stereotypes are inherently irrational owes more to a condescension toward ordinary people than it does to good psychological research.

I'm not sure how 'ordinary people' come into it. Is the author's contention that only 'ordinary people' hold stereotypical views of others? Or that only 'ordinary people's' stereotypes are accurate?

Who the hell is 'ordinary'?

In any case, if you find stereotypes a useful way to think about what other people think, do, or say, far be it from me to stop you.

[hilzoy]

xanax: back when I worked there, it was the Rib House. I think it was on Speedway, though I'm not sure -- it was definitely on one of those big E-W drags.

But I think it went bankrupt about 6 months after I quit, so it would definitely have had a new name. I don't think it got any TARP money, though, not being systemically important.

[xanax]

"I think it went bankrupt about 6 months after I quit,"

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc?

[Fraud Guy]

I knew I had missed something

I rolled into college with a thick rural Kentucky accent – one that resurfaces in faint flashes today, but is otherwise a long time gone. I’ve hated, mourned, and celebrated that accent at different points in my life. And even today, I feel vaguely like a class traitor whenever I say “soda” instead of “coke.”

Actually, you should not feel like a class traitor, but a geographical traitor. "Coke" seems to be synonymous with "carbonated soft drink" in a wide geographical area around Atlanta, Georgia, while "pop" is generally used in my neck of the woods (Chicago). (This was explained to me by a Chicago transplant who moved among GA, FL, and several other southern states later in his life). Maybe if you started saying "beverage" I could concede the class point, but I think you have to make more than $250K/year to reach that such an airy, haute, class.

[russell]

"Coke" seems to be synonymous with "carbonated soft drink" in a wide geographical area around Atlanta, Georgia

Yes, and if you want what the rest of us would call a "Coke" you must ask for "Co' Cola".

Unless you want a Mr. Pib.

[tgirsch]

publius and E-Mart:

This is off-topic, but does either one of you want to comment on the "unconstitutional Bill of Attainder" meme that's going around Right Blogistan right now?

[Linkmeister]

If it was on Speedway it wasn't the Grant Road Tavern, which spoiled me for any other establishment's pastrami sandwiches for life. I swear they grated fresh horseradish.

[Fraud Guy]

Russell,

When I was visiting, us non-natives were usually asked "What kind of coke do you want?"

[GoodOleBoy]

Fraud Guy probably gave a double take when they asked that, but Russell is exactly correct if you want Coca-Cola you asked for Co'Cola. I have a connection since my grandfather worked for Asa Candler in the 1920s in his Briarcliff estate greenhouses growing flowers. He managed to hold that job through the depression since Coca-Cola prospered through that period and I assume Candler's estate did OK as well.

[Fraud Guy]

GOB,

Triple take, especially when they added the next line:

"Sprite, Crush, Dr. Pepper, or Coca-Cola"

Then when I asked for a diet, no ice, their heads started spinning.

[GoodOleBoy]

You folks make me think of stuff I haven't thought of for a long time. When I was a youngster, Coca-Cola was a prime example of a quality product. All soft drinks came only in bottles then and only in one size option for a nickel. Co'Cola was a 6 ounce (famous curvey bottle, they used it to signify a lady with a good figure) size, and the competitors which included Pepsi among others had to provide 12 ounces to compete. Mature sophisticates and local loyalists stood by coke but many of the youngsters went for what we referred to as bellywashers, because, you know, more is better.

[GoodOleBoy]

The only place you could get a soft drink not in a bottle was at the soda fountain in the drugstore and I only remember being able to get Coke that way in the early years. Of course, there was only one version, but you could ask for a shot of cherry syrup and, voila!, cherry coke.

[Gary Farber]

"This doesn't mean that cleaing up transcripts isn't SOP. It just means he took more cleaning up than average."

Brett's correct.

[GoodOleBoy]

And one more thing, the 12 ounce bellywasher was considered by most people to be an outrageous amount of soda pop for one person to drink. So we all can see how far we've come.

[russell]

Russell is exactly correct if you want Coca-Cola you asked for Co'Cola.

My father grew up in GA. I have a lot of family around Statesboro, and also up around Macon.

I had many a Co'Cola on family visits.

Nothing was better than fresh split cane though!

[Gary Farber]

"Coke" seems to be synonymous with "carbonated soft drink" in a wide geographical area around Atlanta, Georgia, while "pop" is generally used in my neck of the woods (Chicago).

I bring you facts!



More at my link.

[Gary Farber]

Don't get me started on my regular egg creams at the candy store after school (in Brooklyn, mostly in junior high school, where I passed the best place on Coney Island Avenue on the way home).

[ral]

mmmmm... facts. Yum.

[russell]

Don't get me started on my regular egg creams at the candy store

Purists insist on Fox's U-Bet syrup.

A buddy of mine and I taught the folks at the local Friendly's how to make egg creams. They thought we were insane.

[Gary Farber]

"Purists insist on Fox's U-Bet syrup."

Just so.

[ThatLeftTurnInABQ]

I bring you facts!

So to segue back to the original topic, has anybody checked to see which word Obama uses to order a soft drink, and if it varies depending on which part of the country he is seeking liquid refreshment in?

[Gary Farber]

He probably uses the word "tea," since his favorite beverage is reported to be Black Forest Berry.




"A fruit infusion made with organic cane sugar, organic hibiscus, organic blackberry leaves, organic berry flavor, organic blueberries, and organic raspberries."

[liberal japonicus]

I have a class for the exchange students here and one lecture, and one of the points I make is that in the US, there is a general sense of situational politeness, while in Japan, generally regardless of the situation, you strike the same level. So when I worked at the prefectural office and went to the drinking district, I occasionally had a chance to meet people who were way above me on the bureaucratic food chain, the deputy governor. No matter how plastered I was or my drinking partners were, we had to suddenly sober up and do our 45 degree bows. Of course, in some situations, being so drunk that you could tell someone exactly what you felt was considered to excuse someone when they did to this, but relations weren't so bad that people wanted to let others know how they really felt. And, of course, the grand pooh-bah always had the option of noblesse oblige and could come down to our level (me being a foreigner, I'd often get this with the handshake and a stab at perfunctory English, and my coworkers, who never got acknowledged, were always awe-struck by this behavior, but I knew it was just to impress the high muckity-muck's entourage with his English ability)

Strangely, because Japanese maintain the same sense of person with individuals because of hierarchical rank in society, they find it much more understandable when people make massive changes in register depending on who they are talking to. Thus, politicians with drinking problems or multiple mistresses never hit the news, unless they really screw up in plain view. However, in the US, there is some sense that the way you address someone is based on the situation you are in, so much so that it is easy to discount those changes and just think of it as facets of one personality that is unchanging.

Unfortunately, in Obama's case, there are a lot of people who would like to seize on any point to buttress their claim that he is somehow unfit to be president. I happened to read the comments of one newspaper article about Obama's dying the WH fountain green, and the eagerness to seize on this as hypocrisy.