I think that Rush's quote later on that Mark Liberman pointed out pretty well shows that Rush meant to at least in part make fun of Obama himself:. Maybe Rush is the original Colbert, and he's been pulling some kind of elaborate Andy Kauffman-like stunt for the last 20 years or so?
One can hope…. I occasionally say "aksk" when I have been around people who say ax and I catch myself starting to say ax instead of ask. I grew up saying ask and was around people who said ask. I also unconsciously mimic accents, badly, when I am having an extended conversation with someone with a strong accent.
I try not to do this now that I have become aware that I am prone to it. I think this "aksk" of Obama was a similar slip and self correction, and not some kind of racial dog whistle. Interesting, but Limbaugh has a roughly 2 second pause after "creamed" and then another fairly long one after "fun", so I'm not sure that the reason for the pause before "President" is only an attempt at implicitly suggesting "black man" to his listeners.
I find Anne Althouse's position to be disingenuous … but sadly not surprising. It's as if vehemently denying the obvious has become a cornerstone of American politics. I was tempted to end the sentence with "lately" but that 's probably the recency illusion. Limbaugh is pandering to racism, and being paid well to do it. He created an opportunity where none existed, to express a negative judgment about the president's race, and to frame his observation in an us versus them way.
It takes a virtuosic performance to say this has nothing to do with racism, and to say it with a straight face. But I suppose it's not "politically correct" to call somebody out for obvious racism, or even just to tell it like it is. I disagree. I remember the taunts my middle school classmates made in in New York, when Mario Cuomo was running against Lew Lehrman for governor of New York:. There was also an open challenge for anyone to shout "Heil Hitler" in class, since our teacher was a Holocaust survivor and hated Hitler, and it was rumored he would have a meltdown if anyone would ever say that.
Lots of us wanted to do it, but no one ever had the guts unfortunately. It wasn't meant to be offensive [nor should it ever be thought to be, as Hitler had many redeeming qualities too]; it was just a chant we said without thinking. And regarding BE Black English "ax", I know my grandparents did not look favorably upon black people and viewed them as criminals. One reason was because they often used "ax" instead of "ask", which evoked images of them literally "axing" people and causing great bodily harm.
Dierk: Yes, Rush is entirely a clown. Those of his listeners who don't recognize his clowning are part of the joke. Unfortunately, they vote too. That's the farce of democracy. Since they vote, others are obliged to act as if he's not entirely a clown. That's the tragedy of democracy. Judging by the plays that survived, it wasn't so very different in ancient Greece. I think it's generally true that Limbaugh usually stays away from bluntly overt racism. But if you listen to him regularly I expect I've been doing that as long as Ann Althouse has , you clearly get the idea that Obama's America is a lot like the one in "Birth of a Nation.
Granted, Limbaugh is basically a circus clown. But it's unusual to live in a time when one of the two major parties owes the bulk of its tone and substance to circus clowns. Oh, and if you're wondering what Limbaugh thinks of linguists, his pet name for the framing dude in California is "George Lakoff-rhymes-with.
Babayaga I'm afraid Jen is not joking. And are Ann Althouse's statements that much different? Babayaga: I am not joking. I was just recalling how kids behaved back in the day.
Have you never watched South Park? People should lighten up and learn to laugh at themselves once in a while. This word has multiple meanings, one of which is 'idiot' or 'disgusting person'. She wasn't referring to his sexual orientation. I was not offended by such language. She did it to shock, and that is her job. It's my experience, though, and I hope you prove me wrong, that guys of your ilk take themselves very seriously, while advising their opponents to lighten up.
But don't worry about me. I think you are a clown, a sad one. In circumstances like these I'm always torn between not wanting to feed the troll and not wanting to let someone leave giant stinking turds on a thread without anyone even mentioning the stench. Is it really your position that black people should consider changing the way they speak because it might be "offensive" to people who don't "look favorably" on black people and think that they are "criminals," or did I miss something?
Limbaugh pronounced it LACK-off. It was pretty striking, not least for the idea of Limbaugh reading a "book" with "ideas" and stuff. But it seemed pretty clear what "LACK-off-rhymes-with" meant. If your grandparents took offense at the word "ask" being pronounced "ax" because they thought it implied a criminal desire to hit people with an ax, then they are perhaps the stupidest people I have ever heard of.
So "rhymes-with" in the same sense in which celibate rhymes with celebrate, or Limbaugh with humbug. I think fev might mean something like "rhymes-with" in the sense of "intentionally mispronouncing his name in order to call him a jack off. In fairness to me, I'd point out that I wasn't the one who "meant" that.
I'm convinced that's exactly what Limbaugh meant, but I was reporting his speech, not buying into it. Limbaugh avoids overt racism in the same way that the Greaseman avoided overt sexual references.
The whole point is to have your stock of elaborate euphemisms that allow you to say incredibly outrageous stuff that you couldn't otherwise say on the radio. People who don't listen to you much don't get it but the regulars love it. I swear he was channeling the Grease. Ah, the memories. Well I do think American Negroes need to learn to speak Standard American English to enhance their employment prospects.
I know for sure I would never hire one who said "ax" in place of "ask", just as I would never hire a person who showed up to an interview in sweats. Intelligent people know how to adapt their speech to conform to what the audience wants. February 27, am. It seems like Limbaugh is using language quite skillfully to achieve the perfect balance of being just barely racist.
But he's also just racist enough to bring out the crazies in his comments section and give them a forum to spew much darker and more vitriolic racism. Maybe Rush agrees with his commenters, maybe not, but either way he's using racism to promote his brand. Those sample comments Mark posted really scare me I'd be afraid of physical harm from those people even though I'm white. I find their use of the word Negroes disturbing — using an older term evokes a time when racism was more institutionally entrenched, and more people would have agreed with their comments.
Now she says Asian. She actually also used to say "faggy" to mean 'uncool', until we kids told her that it was offensive to gay people. Now she doesn't say it. That's tolerance and caring about other people's feelings. Being a good person means trying not to be hurtful, rather than worrying about another group taking "power" over you by "forcing" you to change the hurtful word.
Grow up. When I was growing up, my grandparents said black people were called "Negroes", then they decided to be called "colored people" as in NAACP , then they wanted to be "black", and now it's "African-American". They can't even decide what they want to be called! I called them "Negroes" since if it's ok for Harry Reid to do, then it's ok for me as well. Some people still choose to be called "Negro" on the US Census.
Another opportunity for linguistics to serve society — I got a bachelor's in linguistics before becoming an engineer, so I know that the pronunciation of the word ask is irrelevant to the ability to do most jobs, and certainly no indicator of intelligence.
I'd be much more wary of hiring someone who pretends not to understand a person saying aks instead of ask. But I guess if basic sociolinguistic knowledge and tolerance of dialect variation became widespread in America, people would find some other way to judge others based on race or class, and lump people into groups so they can dislike them more efficiently. Jen, You are seriously one of the most obtuse and overtly racist people we have ever had the displeasure of reading. The fact that you refer to African Americans as 'negroes,' and think nothing of it, is representative of the closemindedness and backwardness of conservative anti thought in the US.
For a person to come on a linguistic blog, and spout the stuff a LING D student could,refute is comical and sad, and makes us realize how much we have still to educate the public. Please take your lack of knowledge to an internet refuse bin, such as Ann Alter's blog. Companies have an image to project, and we cannot have employees speaking in African-American Vernacular English to potential clients and to the public.
Whether that's right or wrong, people must learn what is expected of them in civilized society wear a suit to an interview, speak proper English, don't get caught with choppers in your trunk, etc.
Re "standards that are college and career ready in reading and math": how do the disjunctions distribute? How many standards is he talking about? And why is the third "R" missing? Interesting to see that Prof. For my part, I was genuinely confused about what Limbaugh was trying to insinuate, and my impression was that Tom was helping you explain to me that Limbaugh mispronounces Lakoff's name. God help us all if Limbaugh decides to start talking about Ray Jackendoff.
We'll never hear the end of it. February 27, pm. I've been surprised a number of times by the vehemence I've heard expressed for use of "axe" as a pronunciation of "ask. I was startled, because all previous objections to the term I'd heard seemed to depend on the pronunciation functioning as a racial marker, but Leid's objections were just as strong, though lacking the racial component.
February 28, am. Jen is a troll. I've only been here a few weeks, and I don't know if this place has gotten trolls before, but it's important not to get worked up over them. Excuse the self-advertising, but I tried to set the record straight two years ago on my blog. February 28, pm. His exact ancestry is well-known and doesn't need restating. The reason it hasn't been brought up right now is that it is utterly irrelevant to the current discussion, which is about speech patterns.
I'm sure everyone here realizes that AAVE is not Obama's native tongue; however, he did begin to hang around other blacks when he was a young man, and he has been observed to code-switch depending on whom he's around. At least two contributors to this blog have written pieces commenting on this point:. I think he's good at the oratorical style that arises out of Black preaching, but that's a different thing than a dialect.
Check it out: Jen is on the hiring panel for a management position at a firm. The panel is interviewing a black candidate. He's charming, bright, creative, was head-hunted from a leading competitor, where he oversaw one of the most successful projects in that firm's history. He's killing in the interview, throwing out ideas and getting the panel to really think.
They all realize he will be an amazing asset to their company and could make them a lot of money. He also speaks in African American Vernacular English.
During an intense discussion of the firm's future, he says, "Now let me ax you about the direction the company is taking…". At this point, Jen interrupts.
It brings up violent imagery for me and I find it offensive. So, yes, perhaps his dialect hurt his job prospects. But only because he ended up on Jen's panel. Because Jen chose her racist bias over the success of her firm. Bravo, Jen! Obama has been known to drop in certain AAVE usages on occasion :. This doesn't mean that he's fluent in AAVE, nor does it mean that he's putting it on.
But it does mean that Limbaugh is not incorrect in thinking Obama might speak this way from time to time. I wouldn't be shocked to hear him say "ax," if he did say it. The problem with Limbaugh's remarks was 1 What Obama actually said was "aksk," not "ax" 2 Limbaugh seized on a minor slip of the tongue 3 He implausibly suggested Obama would talk that way in an official address 4 He inappropriately mocked it. Yeah, I was afraid I might get shot down on that, but I really hadn't seen an example before.
Points I wholly agreed with already. Isn't that worse than using blog comments as representative of the viewpoint of the blogger? Let's use commenters on a completely unrelated website in order to demonstrate how they understood Rush, even though they were discussing a youtube video.
What is the nexus to Rush? I cited a transcript of Limbaugh's conversation with a listener, shortly after his remarks, where he and the caller clearly share the idea that Obama is putting on "negro dialect". The freepers' discussion offers another piece of direct evidence — one of them, posting under the name "RushIsMyTeddyBear", notes that "Rush was doing a parody today on this. Too funny". I take this, along with the rest of the freepers' commentary, as support for the way that the wingnut right, Limbaugh included, perceived this event, and for the reaction that he expected to get and got from his audience.
I also note that while trying to weasel out of this argument, you're hiding behind an anonymous throw-away ID and a fake email address. What are you afraid of? March 1, am. March 1, pm. Limbaugh: "This is what Harry Reid was talking about. Clearly, this indicates that Limbaugh, himself, thinks that Obama can "turn on that black dialect".
Limbaugh's other comment repeat that position. That is, Limbaugh is agreeing with Reid! Altenhouse is confused. But in fact, there has been a remarkable lack of curiosity on that score and little incentive to go beyond the sort of routine demonization that only strengthens him.
Limbaugh was smitten early and permanently with the romance of radio and never really wanted to do anything else with his life, including bothering to go to college, let alone taking on his birthright, the leadership of the family law firm. It was a business one could learn only in the doing. On arriving in New York, Limbaugh immediately set to work building his affiliate network and his general visibility, charging forward indefatigably on all fronts at once.
These efforts paid off very quickly. By , the radio-show audience had hit 20 million; his first book, The Way Things Ought to Be , was released in and sold 2 million copies in six weeks, making it at that point the fastest-selling volume in publishing history.
But he really hit his stride with the election of Bill Clinton in Clinton, after all, had come into office borne on a wave of mainstream hosannas, and expectations were high after the year Republican control of the White House. The newly elected Republicans even made him an honorary member of the freshman class of , an honor he coveted, even though he has always thought of himself as a conservative rather than a Republican.
Clinton pushed back, effectively if outrageously associating Limbaugh and talk radio with the Oklahoma City bombing in and winning re-election in in a walk, running against an aging and ineffective Bob Dole.
That did not mean that Limbaugh let up, and the events surrounding Monica Lewinsky in gave him a rich new target, as did the electoral chaos of But a cluster of personal issues, including charges relating to the abuse of prescription drugs and a catastrophic loss of his hearing, all seemed to conspire to place a ceiling on his influence. There was a noticeable ebbing of energy in the show at times, and it was not immune to the fracturing effect the Bush 43 presidency had on conservatives, with internal differences emerging on issues ranging from the prescription-drug entitlement to the Iraq war to immigration reform.
But all that seems to have changed, and Limbaugh clearly has the wind at his back again with a newly growing audience. Like the radio guy he is and always will be, he is a survivor. Events, too, have moved his way. And the rise of Obama has proved nothing less than a godsend for him—though only because he had the boldness to seize the opportunity it presented.
Occasionally, Limbaugh will talk on his show about radio, past, present, and future, and you understand that his great success is no accident.
Able to draw with minuteness on more than four decades of work experience, he has achieved a comprehensive and detailed grasp of the technical, performing, and business dimensions of the industry, all of which give him an unmatched understanding of the medium and its possibilities. He has a deep-in-the-bones feeling for what is magical about radio at its best—its immediacy, its simplicity, its ability to create the richness of imagined places and moments with just a few well-placed elements of sound, its incomparable advantages as a medium for storytelling with the pride of place that it gives to the spoken word and the individual human voice, abstracted from all other considerations.
He probably also understands why he himself is not nearly so good on TV, faced as he is with the classic McLuhanesque problem of a hot personality in a cool medium. AM radio was supposed to have died off years ago due to its weak and tinny sound. It could not have happened without the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in Interactive talk of one sort or another had been around since the earliest days of radio, and there had been, of course, plenty of local talk shows, mostly conservative in flavor, on many stations.
But the Fairness Doctrine kept them within bounds, obliging stations holding broadcast licenses to offer equal representation to all sides of a controversial issue and to provide coverage to issues of local importance. They imposed these requirements on the ground that channels were limited and so it was necessary to ensure that they served the larger public interest. But with the vast and rapid growth of cable and satellite television and radio and other new media, this requirement no longer made any sense.
His show could never have been sustained with the doctrine in place, a fact that has helped fuel the occasional expressions of Democratic interest—most recently coming from Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois—in its reinstitution.
It would be hard, though, to accomplish that without sparking something like an actual revolt in this country. Like everything else, he shares this news with the audience. This was one event he had not talked about. But he will now, on the air. It was for something that seemed almost as important--being noticed. So is his younger brother.
So is his uncle, now a Reagan-appointed federal judge. Young Rusty, however, fell in love with radio while still in elementary school. Anyone who has ever dreamed of performing knows the disease. His dad was part-owner of a radio station. Louis and pretend he was a deejay. It was , a glorious musical era, the Beatles and Motown at full strength, and the notion of college could not compete. Limbaugh, with a high draft lottery number sheltering him from the Vietnam War, left Southeast Missouri State University after a semester of lapsed attendance and lousy grades, including an F in a public-speaking course, and took his first full-time Top job in Pittsburgh.
He was fired after a year and a half. Limbaugh found a second radio job in Pittsburgh and was fired when that station was sold. From there, he got another job playing records at a Kansas City station. That ended after three years. By then, his year-and-a-half-long first marriage, to a sales secretary at the Kansas City station, was over.
In , he got out of radio. Using his voice. A Kansas City station was going all-news. Eventually, he was given two-minute commentaries, but he and management soon parted ways. It was Sacramento was the last shot. Limbaugh got the job and began to develop his format: music; wacky, sometimes savage, humor and conservative politics in a town thought to be dominated by liberals. Ratings nearly tripled. He became a celebrity. As a commercial spokesman, he endorsed everything from jewelry to rib joints to naturally car phones.
He became a conservative flag bearer on a local TV news show, appearing in scheduled debates three times a week. McLaughlin had been president of the ABC Radio Network for 14 years before quitting in to run his own syndication company.
McLaughlin, a San Francisco native, came to Sacramento to listen. The guy sounded too pompous, he thought. He gave it another try, this time reminding himself to think as an audience member, not a businessman, and realized he was hooked. In New York, Limbaugh consolidated the call-screening rules that allow the program to sound like what a number of radio consultants have admiringly described as a local show projected across the country.
Nor will you hear many of the staples of other right-wing broadcasters. Limbaugh regards them as viruses that kill off the broad audience he craves. I want people who think about things with a passion. And I do not want racists or bigots to feel they have a home on the show.
And so it was, in a gesture to his career as an entertainer, that Limbaugh came to Los Angeles for a week in November.
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