Pulsing It

They're such hipsters, those Obama kids!! Via Taegan-

Lynn Sweet notes the new language used by a senior White House official in a background briefing -- "pulsing it" and "pulsing the system" -- refers to how the administration is scrambling to find out about the recent intelligence failures that led to an attempted airplane bombing.

She suggests it's "a new term that may catch on and be part of the political or government lexicon."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor makes her mark

By GottaLaff

This made me so proud:

Justice Sotomayor’s opinion in the case, Mohawk Industries v. Carpenter, No. 08-678, marked the first use of the term “undocumented immigrant,” according to a legal database. The term “illegal immigrant” has appeared in a dozen decisions.

Terms like “illegal alien” and “illegal immigrant” are considered pejorative and offensive by immigrants rights organizations. (HT: ImmigrationProf Blog)

Now imagine who Bush would have (and has) nominated.

Done? Good.

Now grab some Pepto and imagine what Lou Dobbs must be thinking.

I'll stop pushing unpleasant thoughts into your noggins now. I'm sure you'll come up with many more all on your own.

Deep Thought

Could you ever imagine George W Bush using the word "eschew" in a speech?

'What Up, My Obama?': How the president-elect inspired a rapper to clean up his language

By GottaLaff

First Obama sets Al Qaeda back without having to utter a word, and now he has a positive effect on Jim Jones, a Harlem rapper :

Since Election Day, every conversation I have eventually turns to Barack Obama and our emotional reactions to this American epiphany. Jim confessed that the election inspired him to drop the word “nigga” from his vocabulary—where it was a nearly ubiquitous presence—and replace it with “Obama.” He gave me a few examples: “What up, my Obama?” “Yo, did you see them Obamas last night?” “Now that’s a real Obama.”

I was blown away. Black men have used nigga for more than three decades as a way of expressing a certain gallows humor. It is a way of saying, “Hey, if America thinks we’re the national boogie monsters, then fine, we are. Boo!” It stems from a peculiarly black sense of the macabre. But the election has done more than just usher in a black president. It’s begun creating a new America where black people feel like the country perhaps doesn’t hate us the way it once did, and black men no longer feel a need to identify ourselves as America’s monsters.

If words have power, and the slang we use says something about the people we are, then Jimmy’s linguistic U-turn indicates a very powerful shift: away from self-describing as niggas (rebellious, angry, ignorant, hunted), and toward self-describing as Obamas (cool, intelligent, humble, powerful). Away from a self-appellation that reminds us of how America has wronged us, and toward a self-appellation suggesting that we are all reflections of, and extensions of, a shining example of black excellence.

Change is on the way.

Unimaginably good things are happening. BFPE.