President Barack Obama’s speech on Tuesday night has garnered some negative reviews, not so much due to the message itself – that’s inconsequential, after all – as much as the difficult language used by our Commander-in-Chief. Paul Payack, the president of Global Language Monitor, a Texas-based company that analyzes the cultural impact of word choices, considered President Obama’s speech to have been written at a 9.8 grade level.
In other words, you probably had to have gone to high school in order to understand it.
Here’s a sentence from President Obama’s speech, chosen by Mr. Payack as particularly difficult to follow:
“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.”
On the other hand, a phrase like “oil began spewing” was supposedly more comprehensible.
Perhaps it is because English is not my native language, or that I never experienced the American public education system first-hand, but I did not find President Obama’s speech difficult to follow. In my opinion, that sentence which Mr. Payack singled out, is simple and to the point.
I am, quite frankly, disturbed by the notion that the President of the United States should dumb down and simplify his speeches to match the intellects of the academically uninspired. I would go so far as to suggest that the “leader of the free world” should be speaking at a 10th grade level or higher.
Perhaps we got spoiled by those eight years with Bush.
Mika Salakka is a Finn living in the United States. He is a nursing assistant, a creative writer, a devoted husband, and an observer of the human condition. His interests range from music and literature to psychology, sociology, medicine, technology, and spirituality.