The Language Lane

“Well, in being a virtuous leader, that’s where your ability to use the third liberal art of rhetoric comes into play. You must be a good negotiator and motivational speaker, make them see and want to for whatever acceptable reasons inspire them.” “I don’t understand. What’s rhetoric?” “It’s the art of using words effectively and persuasively. It is one of the seven liberal arts taught by the ancient Egyptians to their students. The others are grammar, arithmetic, dialectic,

Only on rereading Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea for my course on African American Autobiography did I ponder name and geography connections. Hughes identifies his paternal great-grandfather as Sam Clay, a white man who lived in Henry County, Kentucky. Sam Clay, Hughes suggests, was a relative of Henry Clay, who was a Senator, Secretary of State, and several times a candidate for President. On this reading, Clay in combination with Kentucky made me think of another famous Clay

Once I was at a composition conference headquartered in downtown Nashville. Some colleagues and I, having never seen Fisk University, decided to make the trip. During our trip, we ran across a sports shop near campus that showcased Negro League memorabilia. When I stepped inside and saw a photo of Satchel Paige, I exclaimed firmly and confidently, “That’s the best pitcher right there.” I was an expert among my companions. An elderly man chuckled and replied, as if I had addre

In the club of ethnic labeling, BIPOC tryna get it in. The term Black, Indigenous and People of Color is a well-meaning attempt in activist circles to highlight particular experiences in relation to oppression and use inclusive terminology as part of anti-white-supremacist initiatives. Of course, you don’t need an acronym to accomplish these things. You can just use more words. Oral speed shouldn’t be much of an issue. I time BIPOC at about .5 seconds and Black, Indigenous an

I missed a good speech on September 15, 1970. The person that gave it, Chuck Scott, as we knew him, was a childhood friend, my next-door neighbor in Corona, Queens, who was like a brother to me. There were five Scott brothers, and I fit right in the middle of the bunch age-wise, so I became an honorary brother, fourth in the birth order, five weeks behind number three. I had a front-row seat to some of Chuck’s compelling orations. He would shadow box around the room with a mo

It is fairly easy to see that white nationalism is largely an expression of fascist impulses. It would be hard not to when white-nationalist trolls circulate in cyberspace calling themselves fashy. Some debate how closely we should tie Donald Trump’s rhetoric to the inane rantings and ravings of these white-nationalist legions. I say we should see them as closely aligned given the evidence of both his presidential campaigns, punctuated so far by his recent speech accepting t

The virtuoso poet Audre Lorde opened her popular poem “Power” with the following lines: The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children. The stanza has puzzled many readers, but there has also been a vibrant and varied critical response. The first stanza is sometimes read as a deft set up for a switch from academic language to the imaginative horror show that follows as Lorde reflects in subsequent stanzas on the 1973 police

Amid several notable responses, CNN legal analyst Laura Coates made a great linguistic move on air the day of Attorney General Bill Barr’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee. In response to Barr’s assertion that in the 1960s the Civil Rights movement succeeded in tearing down the edifice of Jim Crow, Coates rejected the terminology. She replied, instead, “I wish Jim Crow were an edifice, because then it could have been destroyed with the ease of bulldozing a build

A small casualty of COVID-19 was my first scheduled trip to China. In anticipation of my participation in forums about culture, I became curious about the reception in that country of one of the most hyped cultural products of recent years, that is, the motion picture Black Panther. It will come as no surprise that my first stop was the Internet. It turned out that the Internet surprised me. I expected commentary to be varied because in any large group a range of responses al

Never been all that easy to get Black doctoral students through English departments. They know it and I know it. Research not needed to verify. I imagine that’s why my office remained a hub of activity for about fifteen years. It became known as the Barbershop. I’m not going to use the cliché safe space because feelings could get hurt up in the shop. And we definitely were not always on task. But the collective commitment was to keep it poppin, that is, generate projects we h