Mr. Obama, unlike most politicians near a microphone, exults in complexity. He doesn’t condescend or oversimplify nearly as much as politicians often do, and he speaks in paragraphs rather than sound bites. Global Language Monitor, which follows linguistic issues, reports that in the final debate, Mr. Obama spoke at a ninth-grade reading level, while John McCain spoke at a seventh-grade level.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Return of the Column of the Day
One of the most important demographics in this year's election was the college-educated voter. In Sunday's NY Times, Nicholas Kristof contemplates a smarter America (or at least one that appreciated intellectualism) now that Barack Obama is our president-elect:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
An interesting development!
ReplyDeleteA new international language, named after Barack Obama, has been launched to challenge the global language, Esperanto.
It is called Obami and can be seen at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/11/6/23824/4027
However Obami will have a lot of work to do to catch up with Esperanto.
Esperanto is now within the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide, according to the CIA factbook. It is the 17th most used language in Wikipedia, and in use by Skype, Firefox and Facebook.
Native Esperanto speakers, including George Soros, Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet, and World Champion Chess Player, Susan Polger.
The World Esperanto Association enjoys consultative relations with both the United Nations and UNESCO.
Evidence can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
Hey, not related to your column, lol, but you should do vocab quizzes for the lit class but instead of random words like lang, have them be defintion from some of those multiple guess questions we had to do a bit ago. I didn't know many of the words on there and I know I'm not the only one. Just an idea, cause you know, actually looking it up out of my own free will would be effort. Lol.
ReplyDelete