Barack Obama, interviewed on The Late Show, commenting on liberal–left rifts in the Democratic Party:
“What I’m more interested in for Democrats is, do you know how to just talk to regular people like we’re not in a college seminar? Can you talk plain English to folks?... No gobbledygook. Just talk like normal people talk. You know what? Like, ‘The rent is too high.’“I’m trying to decide whom he has in mind when he refers to gobbledygook.
One question I would like to ask the former president: how can it be that the country that elected him twice also elected the current occupant twice? And what does that portend for the future?
[I suspect that Obama was thinking of The Rent Is Too Damn High Party.]
comments: 2
I get annoyed at the term. Same as I hate B.S. and bafflegab, terms that I think are to used to be judgemental and shut down speech. Say, judging from the web, the US no longer has a silent majority, so that could be a connection.
I have a degree myself, but I try to match my topics and words to the folks I'm around, which takes a little effort. My department head said that when she gets tired she starts using big words.
I wanted to quote Obama without agreeing or disagreeing with what he said. But now I’m going to add that it’s wise to be wary of plain language, which can serve toxic political ends. Failure to acknowledge that is for me the big weakness of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”
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