Whatcha talkin’ about Willis?
Gary Coleman, playing Arnold on Different Strokes, made this phrase famous.
Is this the correct spelling to the phrase? Would the meaning of the phrase change if Whatcha became What you? Or more significant of late, would be wrong if a “g” got added to talkin’?
The famous phrase has flavor. The spelling allows the reader to taste the adolescences of a boy speaking to his brother. The spelling would never be considered politically incorrect or racially motivated.
But what if the President of the United States was speaking? What if he unintentionally (or maybe intentionally) dropped the “g” from certain words? Would the press be correct in spelling those words without the last constant? Would they be politically incorrect in this situation?
An Associated Press writer was recently called a “racist” for dropping the “g’s” from words while quoting a speech by President Barack Obama.
If you listen to the speech at the Congressional Black Caucus awards, Obama clearly doesn’t enunciate the g’s. The omission is considered by some experts intentional as the president was trying to speak to a certain audience.
Mark Smith, reported on the speech for AP, and here is a portion of Smith’s translation of the speech.
“Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes,” he said, his voice rising as applause and cheers mounted. “Shake it off. Stop complainin’. Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’. We are going to press on. We have work to do.”
Author and educator Karen Hunter, speaking on Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show, took Smith to task calling his g-less report “inherently racist.” She agreed that the president “knew who his audience was” but the AP should have taken measures to correct the spelling for publication.
Several publications including Politico used the transcript of the speech handed out by the White House with the g on words like complaining, grumbling and crying.
“I don’t think it’s acceptable on any level,” Hunter said on MSNBC. “I teach a journalism class, and I tell my students to fix people’s grammar, because you don’t want them to sound ignorant. For them to do that, it’s code, and I don’t like it.”
Smith defended himself in an interview with Mediaite, a media blog.
Normally, I lean toward the clean-it-up school of quote transcribing – for everyone. But in this case, the President appeared to be making such a point of dropping Gs, and doing so in a rhythmic fashion, that for me to insert them would run clearly counter to his meaning. I believe I was respecting his intent in this. Certainly disrespect was the last thing I intended, Smith said.
John McWhorter, a contributing editor at The New Republic and a linguistics expert, said version of the story with the g’s dropped is actually correct. McWhorter said the folksiness of Obama’s speech doesn’t make him sound ignorant in today’s world.
This might have been a bigger issue if reporters back in the early 1960s tried to convey the New England dialect of John F. Kennedy. And think about how many words George W. Bush butchered during his presidency.
A missing letter in a printed word sometimes doesn’t change the meaning. However, a missing letter from a word in a speech can certainly change the meaning of the message.
Now, that what I’m talkin’ about.
Media Law & Ethics 411 
Posted on October 19, 2011 by tomhanson64
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