A CRITIQUE OF PURE LANGUAGE

I had never heard Jill Abramson speak until I listened to her commencement speech at Wake Forest today. Like many people, I was interested to hear what she had to say, until she started talking. People who watch television may have heard her speak before, but not me. She has the voice and speech patterns of an older Obama and to be honest, I cannot abide listening to him talk. It is physically painful to me to listen to the President of the most scientific and erudite country in the world, address his audience in one or two syllable words and rely on short sentences of less than 10 words. I know he got the job based on his soaring rhetoric and I even watched the famous speech live from a hotel in New London. I was not impressed. Somebody he knew, trusted and respected taught him to stick to short declarative sentences.

Voice is an instrument and it requires tuning, adjustment and a certain amount of training. I get that. Throughout recorded history, people understood that. Oratory was the path to the ruling class for those inclined but not born to the purple. You literally could not join the ruling class until you perfected the Voice.

Never before has there been such a clear example of the ruling class nominating and electing a loser by shoving him, however dismal a speaker he truly is, into the 'oratorical ruling class'. The socialists used him to beat the drum slowly and align the votes to get their man in office. He has been EXTREMELY GOOD for big business and CRONY capitalism. The rest of us, not so much. Simply look at who this man picked as his ruling class.

You could join the managing class and you could be a billionaire owner with a voice that cut metal but to win the hearts and minds, you needed to cultivate a persona and that includes getting a voice that matches. Listening to her commencement speech today was on par with listening to Obama fail to explain anything that a reasonable 10 year old understands better than he does.

I listen to the ebb and flow of conversational English. I'm no Colonel Pickering but I can tell the difference between a Hawkbill and a handsaw when I hear it. I just happen to agree with Henry Higgins. I see that it was nothing but a play every time I see a Jill or Barack move up to the top of the heap. On the other hand, the people who lurve them are hard core socialists and I'm OK with that. They tend to wreck their own future when they take control. They're the first against the Wall.

I never once, had to subject my working days to listening to somebody who used whiny voice when talking to me. If this person did communicate with me as she does to the students in the video, I'd have avoided her entirely and relied on email and letters for all communications.

OTOH, if 

The Lady of the House of Ceausescu is not sounding whiny. It makes me wonder what the Bolshevik murder of the Tsarina and her children sounded like. Her, "I have the Right to do what I want." is pure Libertarian. What a pity she failed and joined the hard left socialist cause.

There's a host of articles today at Instapundit about the firing and contentiousness but none seem to address the fact that listening to Ms. Abramson speak is a torture on par with water-boarding or listening to 10 minutes of the President talking.

Scary thing? He decided that the very best gift he could give another Head of State was a USB drive with all of his speeches. We're lucky the Queen didn't urge her government to declare war on us for the 5th time.