The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    Dumb It Down, Mr. President

    President Barack Obama's speech on Tuesday night has garnered some negative reviews, not so much due to the message itself - that's inconsequential, after all - as much as the difficult language used by our Commander-in-Chief. Paul Payack, the president of Global Language Monitor, a Texas-based company that analyzes the cultural impact of word choices, considered President Obama's speech to have been written at a 9.8 grade level.

    In other words, you probably had to have gone to high school in order to understand it.

    Here's a sentence from President Obama's speech, chosen by Mr. Payack as particularly difficult to follow:

    "That is why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation's best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge - a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation's secretary of energy."

    On the other hand, a phrase like "oil began spewing" was supposedly more comprehensible.

    Perhaps it is because English is not my native language, or that I never experienced the American public education system first-hand, but I did not find President Obama's speech difficult to follow. In my opinion, that sentence which Mr. Payack singled out, is simple and to the point.

    I am, quite frankly, disturbed by the notion that the President of the United States should dumb down and simplify his speeches to match the intellects of the academically uninspired. I would go so far as to suggest that the "leader of the free world" should be speaking at a 10th grade level or higher.

    Perhaps we got spoiled by those eight years with Bush.

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    Comments

    Oh, god. I was hoping this was satire…


    Paul Payack is as dumb as rocks.

    I hope I kept that at the right grade level.


    You're pushing it with the use of simile. Try "Paul Payack is dumb."


    A few years back, I was at a conference/seminar at which journalists from across the continent exchanged ideas about specific challenges they faced. One editor from (let's say) a mid-sized newspaper in the South explained how, after a reporter finished a story, it would be put through a program like a spellchecker. Except that it would not be looking for typos. No, its purpose was to flag words deemed to exceed the reading abilities of the paper's average reader -- which, the editor explained to me, was not very high.

    I was horrified. Rather than seeking to raise readers' comprehension skills by forcing them to think (and maybe open a dictionary from time to time), or pushing for the state to raise literacy levels in its schools, the paper's management was simply accepting the lowest common denominator as its standard. That's how empires fall.


    We use the same program at dagblog. It never flags my writing though.


    What does "flags" mean?


    Flag: (noun) A flaccid goat


    We really could use a goat exterminator around here. What are we feeding Mega-Shark, anyway?