John H. McWhorter Quotes.
We must neither behave as children by resisting honesty, nor allow ourselves to be treated as children by having honesty withheld.
I think what Obama does more than his amazing speaking ability is he’s able to connect with voters. And it’s that hope that he brings out in American citizens that we are all hungry for, that people get excited about Sen. Obama.
Texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk?
Obama is seen as very, very cool. I think a lot of people find him sexy.
I think even in today’s America, there’s a sense that there’s something vaguely sexy about cigarettes.
Racism is not dead. Definitely, there are these biases.
The only way that residual racist feelings could affect legislation, in my opinion, is through a lack of priorities, from not doing things.
If you took away the color of Barack Obama’s skin, nobody right now would be paying him any attention.
People have been warning us that language was going to the dogs ever since Latin started turning into French. Yet the dogs in question never seem to emerge yelping on the horizon.
People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.
Texting is fingered speech. Now we can write the way we talk.
Ebonics – or black English, as I prefer to call it – is one of a great many dialects of English. And so English comes in a great many varieties, and black English is one of them.
Every third person in the world is a drama queen. And crying ‘victim,’ especially when you’re not really a victim in any real way, feels good. It feels good to cry victim if you’re not one.
English, however, is kinky. It has a predilection for dressing up like Welsh on lonely nights.
A person you excuse from any genuine challenge is a person you do not truly respect.
Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.
Frankly, Barack Obama is a standard issue leftist that you would expect of somebody with his particular experience, and he doesn’t exactly hide it.
Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.
No longer can we measure compassion by how much we spend on poverty but how many people we help to lift out of poverty.
I don’t think that we really know a whole lot about Barack Obama at all that you would really call distinctive.
