The world of the early twenty-first century is one divided by factionalism and suspicion, and connected by new channels of communication that are uneditable, instantaneous, and anonymous. Therefore the most important thing a modern president must know in order to be effective is how to use language,  both interpretively and actively, both domestically and globally. [...]

The White House website announced that the State Department has prepared translations of President Obama’s major “A New Beginning” speech delivered at Cairo University .

There are translations into 13 languages so far: Arabic, Chinese, Dari, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Turkish, Urdu and Portuguese. And at the [...]

How much is the $100 million dollars in budget cuts compared to the federal budget as a whole? This video imagines the budget as $100 in pennies to provide the answer.

As visualized through a Facebook news feed! Enjoy.

An article by Neelabh Mishra entitled “An Awadhi Lilt For Obama: Let’s realise that language bridges make for creative cohesion,” appearing in this fortnight’s issue of Outlook, an Indian news magazine, caught my attention today. The title was immediately interesting to me: I was curious about how Awadhi (अवधी), a dialect of Hindi [...]

Or does he? According to the Canadian Globe and Mail,

“Barack Obama’s supposed grammatical gaffes have stirred up the hornet’s nest of disagreement between grammarians and historians, and we’re back to arguing about an old topic: I and me.”

Shall we stand by the president? Between you and I, or…err…you and me, I think [...]

In a recent talk by Claire Kramsch, she said: “Transcultural competence is not the bland coexistence of multiple cultures under the happy banners of diversity. It is the much more risky circulation of values across historical and ideological timescales; the negotiation of non-negotiable identities and beliefs.”  

What does it mean to negotiate the [...]

Seeing the super-giga-sized and somewhat creepy photo of the thousands of people assembled in front of the Capitol building last week for Obama’s inauguration, with its thousands of unsuspecting faces all looking intently toward the speaker in question, made me wonder: how many other things were going on on the same day, in [...]

The inauguration of now President Barack Obama was just 7 days ago, yet already it feels far away. It’s disappeared from our own front page on FIT, as it has from blogs and newspapers all around the country And after the rush of first-week policymaking, the first week of classes here at Cal, and business [...]

Gabriel Dance, senior multimedia producer for The New York Times, has developed The Election Day Word Train in collaboration with the Interactive News Team.  It’s updated hourly with the words that best describe people’s moods.  Check out the difference between McCain and Obama supporters.

[find it here]

So, what one word describes your current state [...]

As Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the forty-fourth president on January 20th, I was dozing off somewhere high over a deep turquoise Atlantic Ocean.

The nightmare began on Saturday night…dense fog enveloped New Delhi, India, as I headed out from the ‘burbs to the Indira Gandhi International Airport. On [...]

pictures from today’s inauguration ceremony on Sproul Plaza:

Dave’s camera broke so we both used mine.

The UC Berkeley media release page has a slideshow of the inauguration.

(Photo above linked to NYT article mentioned below)

The second most popular story in the New York Times today, the day of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, is about language and reading: “From Books, New President Found Voice“, writes Michiko Kakutani.

The article draws parallels between [...]

Ah, the fluidité of deictics! The we’s, the you’s, how oft we reference them, even when the you’s leak into the we’s, and the we’s fail to envelop us…How provocative the notion that we delineate spaces and build walls around people through these crisp syllables, how we identify and alienate, make our own and make [...]

The staff and press corps accompanying President-Elect Obama these days have developed some entertaining code words…see if you can guess what they mean!

1. PEOTUS/POTUS/PEBO
2. FLEOTUS
3. FLEMO
4. CLEAN vs. DIRTY
5. VITALS
6. POOLSPRAY
7. PRO-BAMAS
8. LID
9. POST-LID

Yes We Did!

How many did you get right?