President Obama’s speech on the gulf oil disaster may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday.
Tuesday night’s speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level, said Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor. The Austin, Texas-based company analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choice and their impact on culture.
Though the president used slightly less than four sentences per paragraph, his 19.8 words per sentence “added some difficulty for his target audience,” Payack said.
He singled out this sentence from Obama as unfortunate: “That is why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge — a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s secretary of energy.”
“A little less professorial, less academic and more ordinary,” Payack recommended. “That’s the type of phraseology that makes you (appear) aloof and out of touch.”
Uttering anything more complicated than “Drill, baby, drill” makes you an elitist. Apparently Obama should have grabbed his balls and said “Don’t worry, ‘Murica. We’re gittin ‘er done!”
And the worst thing is our media is leading the way.
mr. whipple
I’m leaving for a few days and not taking a laptop. I need a break from the insane.
Comrade Jake
Well, at least now we know why W was so successful connecting with Americuhns.
El Cid
Well, this
should have been more like, “When that shit blowed up, I got this Fu-Man Chu, like, super scientist and he got a bunch of other like 9 foot tall brilliant guys and they was like gonna use their brain rays to see right through it and figger it all out.”
Lisa K.
That’s because despite being clean and articulate, most of our media have less-than-Palin IQs. That’s got to be the reason-why would *smart* people act like such insufferable boneheads????
Incertus (Brian)
Thanks for making me hate the world this early in the morning. Might be a record. I wonder what Payack would make of a poetic response to the spill?
br
Now I understand everyone’s shit’s emotional right now. But I’ve got a 3 point plan that’s going to fix EVERYTHING.
Number 1: We’ve got this guy Not Sure.
Number 2: He’s got a higher IQ than ANY MAN ALIVE.
Number 3: He’s going to fix EVERYTHING.
arguingwithsignposts
Just another opportunity for Tweety to mention that Obama says “Nobel prize-winning” too much.
Comrade Jake
Slightly OT, but if you’re looking for more examples of raw, unadulterated stupidity, I suspect few things surpass Michelle Bachmann’s characterization of the BP escrow account as just another means to spread the wealth around.
TR
His next Oval Office address should be a WWE-style smack talk directed at the oil spill. Maybe he can rip his shirt off like Hulk Hogan and bug his eyes out for the camera.
Would that be enough to satisfy Chris Matthews? Maybe, maybe not. He should probably break a folding chair over Tony Hayward’s head and then turn to the camera, pointing and growling “I’m coming for you next, bad water!”
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Somehow, this scene popped into my head.
Son, your on your own.
NobodySpecial
Funny, I haven’t heard anyone who actually watched the speech bitch that the President was too smart for the audience except for the press.
Wait, that makes sense. Well, the mystery is solved!
chopper
don’t worry, scrot. there are lots of ‘tards out there living really kick-ass lives. my first wife was ‘tarded, she’s a pilot now.
gnomedad
The horror, the horror …
JGabriel
Since most people make it to 12th grade, I fail to see how this is a problem.
The problem, instead, is that we have a media that
thinksfeels this is a problem, and then tells the rest of the country to feel that way.Funny how this was never a problem when Bush was in office. If the biggest complaint our media has with Obama is that he’s too smart, I can live with that.
.
Gemina13
Any chance we can start using members of the media to hoover up the oil spill? Just find a way to fix their mouths open, harness them with very long leashes, and drag them from a slow-moving supertanker through the Gulf. They’d be more useful that way.
ChrisS
@br:
Number 1: We’ve got this guy Steven Chu.
Number 2: He’s got a higher IQ than ANY MAN ALIVE.
Number 3: He’s going to fix EVERYTHING.
Number 3.5: America is great, God is great, and we’re going to get through this with the power of prayer.
dmsilev
@arguingwithsignposts:
I think that Obama and Chu should call a joint press conference and show up wearing their medallions around their necks, suitably mounted on flashy gold chains.
Also, re: Tweety, just once I’d like a guest to say to him “well, we tried having a guy who pretended to be an ‘ordinary guy’ as President and it was a disaster. Maybe we should give the smart guy a chance? I really don’t care if he can’t bowl.”.
dms
Hal
Sigh-in-test? eng-uh-neers? What are those?
RedKitten
So instead of bemoaning the fact that American society is becoming more stupid, the media is bitching that the president does not speak down to their level.
“‘Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’ How’s that sound so far, gentlemen?”
“I’m sorry Mr. President, but there are 30 words in that sentence, and so it’s just too difficult for your target audience. How about ‘Long ago, we built a new country and shit. And everybody was the same, so it was really cool.’ I think that would probably work better.”
Taterstick
That’s okay. The “media” have now gone from criticizing the speech to blowing the “small people” comment way, way out of proportion – and forgetting all about the $20 BILLION fund as well as the $100 Million for oil workers wages that the President got them to fucking volunteer.
What mindblowingly stoopid people work in teevee anymore.
Terrell
@TR:
And yet, that wouldn’t stop the leak any faster. I haven’t watched Chris Matthews for along time now. And I haven’t had Olbermann or Maddow on for two nights in a row. I feel so much better!
El Cid
I’m wondering what grade level they’d prefer Obama to speak to. Or is it just too many words and not enough pictures?
As Steve Doocy said, “China is a big country, and they need a lot of stuff.” That ain’t no pointy-head effeminate high reading level shit — that’s Real America Fox & Friends.
Jon H
Naturally, he’s from Texas.
They’re fighting a multi-pronged assault on our nation’s intellectual standards.
Mudge
Damn right. Obama has to speak so that those moran teabaggers understand him. Never leave it to the Republicans to translate.
El Cid
You know who was a good speaker who could hold rallies and talk about his agenda and get cheers from a simple crowd?
No, not that guy — I mean that asshole West Virginia mine owner who would harangue crowd with redneck anti-gubmit anti-yoonyun speeches along with Ted Nugent.
D-Chance.
Oh-boy’s talking 17-dimensional chess in a room full of checkers players…
Ash Can
Why are there enough people in this world willing to pay this Payack guy for his bullshit that he can make an entire fucking living out of it, and why would any so-called news organization take him seriously enough to quote him?
A 9.8 grade level is too difficult? Seriously? On the other hand, maybe that really is the case in Texas, and that state’s school system is further along the road to hell than I thought.
Bill In OH
I know this has been repeated time and time again, but Jeezus tap dancing christ on a cracker, why in the world would anybody NOT want smart people to be in charge?
And also too, what RedKitten said.
ChrisS
John S.
Time to put the BP executives into Monday Night Rehabilitation. Beef Supreme is gonna fuck that Tony Hayward up good. Especially since he talks like a fag.
CalD
So much for Thomas Jefferson’s grand designs on creating the world’s first true meritocracy.
fucen tarmal
@Comrade Jake:
actually the daily mash, a brit version of the onion scooped her
tomvox1
But, but, but…he said “Ass” the other day!
giltay
Well, grade 10 is pretty high for readability. The New York Times, frex, is around a grade 8 reading level. That said, why are they trying to apply readability estimates to a speech? (And why even mention the average number of letters per word?)
Max Bialystok
What’s the rumpus? These here magic beans will stop the leak instantly and soak up every last drop of oil.
some other guy
With apologies to Sarah Palin, rather than thinking of America as a nation of fucking retards, I prefer to think of us as a nation of Jackie Chans.
Pug
@Comrade Jake:
The irony of it is that the money will be going mostly to Gulf Coast right-wingers who never do anything except bitch about the government until something goes wrong, then they bitch about the government not helping them fast enough. You know, Michelle Bachmann’s constituency.
I say we run Louisiana and Mississippi out of the Union. They aren’t happy anyway and I just don’t think this relationship is working out for America.
Matthew B.
Ah, another self-promoting press release from Paul J.J. Payack’s consulting company that the newspapers regurgitate near-verbatim.
Language Log is always on about this guy. His biggest stunt was a years-long countdown to the alleged millionth word to enter the English language. (Payack claims this was “Web 2.0.”)
some other guy
Obama should go all Samuel L. Jackson on these clowns.
malraux
Its like a monster truck you can pour into your face.
All that said, this reminds me of how the press would savage Clinton’s SotU speeches for being long and boring, and yet his popularity would go up and the instapolling on the speech always found that the public liked the detail.
Incertus (Brian)
@Matthew B.: I love Language Log. They deliver such precise beatdowns.
Punchy
Go ask Palin supporters. She has a better than zero chance of being elected, which really ought to scare the fuck out of all Americans.
Scott
He singled out this sentence from Obama as unfortunate: “That is why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge—a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s secretary of energy.”
“A little less professorial, less academic and more ordinary,” Payack recommended. “That’s the type of phraseology that makes you (appear) aloof and out of touch.”
I guess the preferred phrasing would be: “Oil go in water. Me get smarties to help.” Then he could go pull on a locked door and make a funny face.
MMonides
Meanwhile, what I’ve been reading indicates that working class voters were actually moved by the speech. Apparently it went over the media elite’s heads.
Wag
“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” HL Menken
Those words were deemed true nearly a century ago, and, unfortunately, are deemed true today. I’m with the President, though. If you don’t give the American people a reason to rise above the gutter, they’ll stay there forever.
one two seven
I saw a pickup truck the other day with a bunch of right wing bumper stickers. The usual slogans about socialism and taking their guns away.
My favorite though was the one that said “Journalist Are Destroying This Country” No typo, thats what it said verbatim.
The sad thing is that it was the one I most agreed with.
Comrade Javamanphil
@Comrade Jake: So compensating small business, which is where all the job creation occurs so we need tax breaks yesterday, because they cannot work because some big foreign company fouled the pool is redistribution of wealth? Why does Michelle Bachmann hate small business. And puppies.
Quackosaur
Can someone explain to me how this quote could be considered
“insensitive”?
Apparently Obama shouldn’t say that because “New Orleans lost a third of its population” and is “still recovering.”
Also, it’s a sad indictment of the country when we can’t expect voters to have a tenth-grade reading level.
Chris Johnson
God fucking damn it.
Uneducated retards can’t fix big broken oil pipes under water.
You’re going to get a dead guy and a sad little shovel floating away.
Or possibly a condom.
Sheila
@arguingwithsignposts: Matthews was probably upset that Obama’s speech didn’t cause tingles to run up his leg.
demimondian
I’ll be honest — I listened to the speech, and that very sentence jumped out at me as simultaneously defensive and pompous. Yes, Secretary Chu has a Nobel prize. That has NOTHING to do with his ability to direct a massive paramilitary clean up. The fact that he runs the energy department pretty well, though, has EVERYTHING to do with that.
I think the sentence could have been unpacked and made stringer by focusing on what Steven Chu is, not on what he’s been recognized for. “When the rig sank, we responded quickly by finding the best people to handle the Government’s oversight of the response. In this case, I asked the Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, who is both a brilliant engineer and a brilliant administrator, to take charge of the Federal response team.”
wilfred
What about Roosevelt’s fireside chats?
Randy P
I think what’s most telling about this commentary is that the only actual “analysis” of the speech was a couple of milliseconds by a computer program. No mention of actual content.
It reminds me of something I’ve seen in other op-ed writers over the years. They’ve all got access to Lexis-Nexis, and apparently it includes some textual analysis tools. So we get whole columns on how many times the word “bible” is mentioned within 10 words of, I dunno, “pretzel” in John Kerry speeches.
Have any national op-ed writers done a whole column on a word cloud yet? It wouldn’t surprise me.
demimondian
Oh, for Christ’s sake.
Look, folks, conversation doesn’t happen at the tenth grade level. *Discourse* doesn’t happen at the tenth grade level. Conversation and discourse happen at the fourth or fifth grade levels; only text reaches past that — and, yes, text rarely reached the tenth grade level.
President Obama is a great speaker when he remembers that. He falls down, and sounds distant and remote, when he forgets. That’s because he *is* distant and remote when he forgets. If this is a national crisis, then he needs to be motivating and accessible — and that means remembering that effective speeches alternate between candid and straightforward (in the managerial parts) and oratorical and inspiring (in the motivational parts).
cleek
sorry, Mr Lincoln, that sentence has 30 words. it will go right over their heads. and the words you used are a bit too lofty – you’ll seem aloof and professorial. you should assume your audience is made up of insolent, impatient 14 year olds.
let’s work on this…
“America was born eighty seven years ago. Liberty was one goal. Ensuring equality for all men was another goal.”
well, that’s better. much tighter.
but do you think we could do it as a rap? i hear kids these days really like that. or, could you do it as a parody of a real speech – i hear John Stewart does well with that approach.
Original Lee
From people I know who work as reading specialists, the more complicated the subject, the less complicated the sentences have to be.
Most local newspapers are written at about the 4th Grade reading level. Most national newspapers and magazines are written in the 6th-8th Grade reading level. Because so many Americans now get the bulk of their news from TV and radio, reading specialists are evaluating spoken content as well as written content for “understandability”. Most political speeches score in the 6th-7th Grade level, for instance, as do most newscasts. Our media elite overlords complain about Obama because they have to work at dumbing-down what Obama said instead of just doing their usual stenography.
We are so screwed as a nation.
Original Lee
WTF with modding my last post? Maybe I didn’t say fuck often enough.
RedKitten
@cleek: Copycat. ;-)
demimondian
@cleek: With all due respect to you and to RedKitten, I think you’re missing the point. Obama’s “Yes We Can” speech will go down in history. It was one of the greatest orations I’ve ever heard.
Yesterday’s? Yeah, no, not so much. He used big and distancing sentences when he was being defensive, and that’s what people are pouncing on. Again, the sentence in question *is* bad — not just because of its complexity, but, more importantly, because of its stupid puffery.
In that context, Steve Chu’s Nobel doesn’t matter, and inserting a reference to it just weakens the sentence. That shows up as a technical flaw in the sentence itself, but the technical flaw points out a real problem with its content. What I fault the author of the newspaper piece about is not realizing that fact.
AxelFoley
@TR:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Dude, you just took me back to middle school with that.
wilfred
Roosevelt spoke on the radio regularly, often during times of hardship and crisis.
The people listening were largely farming families, which meant mainly high school dropouts.
I’m going to you tube and listen….
RedKitten
I have no issue with faulting him for being too wordy. Oration definitely should not meander. However, I really don’t think that is what Payack was focusing on — he was talking about grade levels, and that bullshit “aloof” accusation again. The entire thing just reads as yet another excuse to accuse Obama of being out of touch with “real Americans”.
cleek
@demimondian:
i wasn’t trying to say that this speech was great oration. it wasn’t, and he had some trouble delivering it. no big deal, though.
because, the fact that he doesn’t dumb down his speeches and talk in little 3rd grade sentences probably accounts for the fact that people think he speaks like an adult talking to another adult. and that’s a huge plus.
even if he got a little sloppy on a sentence or two, so what? frankly, it’s rarely a good idea to apply strict rules of grammar to the spoken word – people don’t speak in correct English grammar.
agree with RedKitten. the quoted article is just another way to make him seem aloof.
Comrade Mary
ARGHH — computed reading level scores! RUN! In fact, I’m just taking a break from writing training material at a 6th grade reading level, so this is something I’ve been dealing with for a while.
Reading level and listening level aren’t the same thing. A sentence that looks complicated on the page may make more sense when spoken, timed and phrased appropriately. I thought most of Obama’s speech flowed quite well for the target audience, although a couple of rather academic vocabulary choices (can’t remember exactly what choices right now) did leap out at the time.
I don’t know what reading/listening level you’d assign to a typical Palin serving of word salad. Forget 6th or 9th grade: think irrational numbers.
wilfred
This is Roosevelt’s Fireside Chat # 4:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXY7TkrPPzI
It’s one complex sentence after another (you can hear where the semi-colons go.) Be interesting to know what grade level…
The content is very much worth listening to (and very timely for us!) — he’s describing the government’s remedies for farm and home foreclosure.
demo woman
IMO..Payack is showing his elitism by assuming the public did not understand the President of the United States.
Donald G
How my classmates laughed back in eighth grade way back in 1980 when I insisted I was more qualified to vote than many adults and that the franchise should be extended to gifted and talented fourteen year olds. By that time, my reading level exceeded the twelfth grade level by a few years.
Today, too many of these very same classmates are Republicans and Palin worshipers.
demimondian
@cleek: Let’s look back at the opening sentence of the Gettysburg address:
“Fourscore and seven years ago, our forefather brought forth on this continent, a new Nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Compare that to the second paragraph of Tuesday night’s address:
“On April 20th, an explosion ripped through BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, about forty miles off the coast of Louisiana. Eleven workers lost their lives. Seventeen others were injured. And soon, nearly a mile beneath the surface of the ocean, oil began spewing into the water.”
Notice how similar those are? Think that’s a coincidence? Yeah, me neither.
ETA: In fact, I wish he’d led with it, and moved the paragraph he did lead with to the next one down…
Karen
Payack assumes the general public didn’t understand the speech because the general public inside Texas didn’t understand the speech.
He doesn’t understand there are brains outside Rick Perry’s arena, but none inside. If he understood that, he wouldn’t have a problem with it.
Kryptik
Payack seems to have the ire of “fellow” linguists for his work. I say “fellow” since according to the folks at Language Log, run by resident linguists at PennU, he’s a total hack. For what it’s worth:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=payack
I wouldn’t be surprised honestly, but you know that it’s not gonna matter a whit whether he’s a fraud or not. Hell, it’ll help him since it just proves that he’s not an ‘out of touch elitist academic’.
Toast
“Hey, the president’s on television speaking about the oil spill. Are you going to watch?”
“GO ‘WAY! ‘BATING!”
acallidryas
I believe this Get Your War On panel summarized this best back in 2004. Sorry it’s large- I took too much work time trying to find the panel and decided not to waste more trying to resize it.
Lurking Canadian
The worst possible thing in a crisis is to have intelligent, trained professionals working on it. What the president should have done is call Joe the Plumber. He’s a real American, and he knows how to fix a leaky pipe, unlike all them pointy heads.
terry chay
9.8 grade level? Someone putting a decimal point at the end of things thinks it’s more accurate.
CS Lewis Jr
CNN reports on fraud linguist’s Obama speech analysis
By Alex Pareene
Reuters
According to Paul J.J. Payack, president of “Global Language Monitor,” an Austin, Texas-based company that “analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choice and their impact on culture,” President Obama’s Oval Office address Tuesday was far too professorial for his intended audience. Payack reveals his analysis of the speech in a report released Wednesday, and duly reported on by CNN.
Payack, of course, is not a linguist. He is a professional self-promoter who provides ready-made bullshit “stories” about language to media outlets like CNN. He is a professional expert with no expertise. He is a fraud. CNN has been going to him for stories like this for years, of course.
According to the actual linguists at Language Log:
For starters, Payack is not a professional linguist — he often boasts of a Harvard degree, which turns out to be some coursework in comparative literature that he took through Harvard’s extension program.
This language expert cannot even correctly identify the passive voice.
So not only is this story completely insulting — a speech supposedly written at the 10th-grade level is too sophisticated for common folk in “Katrina land,” according to Payack — it is also based on the “research” of a complete fraud. It not much different from running a story on important new findings in evolutionary biology based on a child’s science fair project on frogs.
asiangrrlMN
Would it be mean of me to say that I wish Obama had said what Cole pretended he said, THEN grabbed his balls and said, “SUCK IT!”?
Look, my problem with the whole speech is that he was practically forced into giving it. Then, he’s ripped apart for everything he said and didn’t say, whatever he’s done and hasn’t done. He’s not emotional enough. He said ass so he’s too ghetto. He speaks at a tenth grade reading comprehension level (which is mixing apples and oranges, anyway).
I am listening to the speech right now (I rigorously avoided it), and I appreciate his level-headed approach, and I’m sorry, but nitpicking that he said Chu was a Nobel Prize winning scientist as being elitist or irrelevant is irritating. If someone does not know the very basics of Chu’s history, then fuck ’em.
Since Obama cannot win no matter what he does, I want him to go out and say (according to the iconic picture), “Chill the fuck out. I got this. Bitchez”, grab his balls, and march out the door.
Jrod
OMG, Obama mentioned the Nobel prize in a speech that wasn’t as good as the Gettysburg address, which is widely considered the best speech given by a US President over the past 200+ years? Fire up articles of impeachment! It’s that fucking important!
God forbid our President spends his time actually doing things, rather than spending hour after hour combing his speeches for imperfections.
For fuck’s sake…
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@asiangrrlMN:
What really needs to be said.
YellowJournalism
Sarah Palin’s sentences usually have more than 19 words in them. Unfortunately, we’re usually not sure how they all go together.
Bill Murray
@Original Lee: speshalist (correctly spelled) includes a frequently spammed boner pill so trips the filter
Jrod
I can’t be the only person here who would rather see a couple boner pill spams than have such a large chunk of the fucking language be off limits. Particularly when one of those words is a frequent subject of discussion.
Can the spam filter really not be modified?
CPinHI
They are confusing reading with talking. It may very well be difficult for many Americans to read at a 9.8 grade level, thanks to the wonderful school systems throughout our country, but when someone is talking, it is much easier for people to understand. It is because our brains are wired for speech, while reading is a learned skill.
Chris
Perhaps they wanted…
the Fox News level translation
The funny thing is, if you read the “translated” speech with W’s speech patterns and mannerisms, it sounds just like a Bush speech…
Phoenician in a time of Romans
I guess the preferred phrasing would be: “Oil go in water. Me get smarties to help.” Then he could go pull on a locked door and make a funny face.
Actually, I’d like John Stewart to start running his speeches with the “Translation for Fox audience” version running along the bottom. Not just as a one off sketch, but as a regular feature to sting Fox for catering to the dumb.
gnomedad
This is
AlabamaAmerica. We speak English. Just not above 7th-grade level, please.