People have been warning us that language was going to the dogs ever since Latin started turning into French. Yet the dogs in question never seem to emerge yelping on the horizon.

Racism is not dead. Definitely, there are these biases.

I think what Obama does more than his amazing speaking ability is he's able to connect with voters. And it's that hope that he brings out in American citizens that we are all hungry for, that people get excited about Sen. Obama.

The black conservative is responsible for making people question an idea that racism must be extinct before black people can overcome. Understanding that our goal is to thrive despite racism rather than fetishizing it is, in fact, the central ideological plank of people deemed "black conservatives." This is a coherent position, but that can be hard to perceive, given the way that race has been discussed in our land over the past 40 years or so.

Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.

No longer can we measure compassion by how much we spend on poverty but how many people we help to lift out of poverty.

Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.