Tongues Untied

Our decisions about which politicians we trust often come down to a simple question: "How do they talk?" So says Robin Lakoff, a professor of sociolinguistics at the University of California-Berkeley. We asked her to decode some of the current hopefuls' speech patterns.

Fri December 21, 2007 12:00 AM PST

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Lakoff sometimes bores me. He commits the same faults that he claims to solve by continuing to live in an "us vs them" world. Enough already!

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SO, the blatent attempts to mariginalize the presidential candidates has reached Mother Jones. Shame on you.

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What about Kucinich and Gravel????? Why are these two reasonable men always left out?

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Sociolinguistics? "It ain't what you say, it's the way that you say it, that's what gets results." How about "Whose lies do you want to believe?" Bottom line: spinning makes one dizzy!

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re: the Hillary southern twang - I'm kind of sick of people commenting that she was mis-representing herself...of course she was! - she was READING in the writer's voice.

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indeed. where are Kucinich & Gravel?

its like a bloody *shunning* isn't it? a real down-home *shunning* until we 'get it Right'.

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