Sunday, November 9, 2008, 10 a.m. Stopped at a traffic light on Wilson Blvd. in Arlington, Virginia.
A black woman about 30 with a young boy, perhaps her son, walks in front of my car in the crosswalk.
For the first time in her life, she can not only say, but also mean it when she utters the words that have not seen their fruition until this past week: “You can grow up to become anything you want to be.”
May God protect President-Elect Barack Obama and the United States of America.
SILVER SPRING, MD (Rueters) – The American political landscape is littered with the countless victims of those who strove to occupy the Oval Office. This year is no exception, but 2008’s carnage includes a surprise, a casualty known and loved the world over: the air (or finger) quote!
“Senator McCain has transformed the so-called air quote from a sign that signifies satire, sarcasm, irony, and euphemism to one of derision, disrespect, patronizing, and condescension,” said Daphne Florenzina, president of the National Association of the Deaf, in a press statement today.
“As a result, the NAD has, with the American Sign Language Teachers Association and the Association of Sign Language Interpreters, removed the air quote from our Sanctioned Sign Language Directory,” Florenzina announced.
The NAD press statement concluded, “Given that the ‘viral’ nature of the Internet, and YouTube in particular, has sadly served to establish McCain’s redefinition of the air quote globally, we are encouraging our sister organizations worldwide to join us in the passing of the air quote, and in the search for a new sign to take its place.”
While the air quote was not actually given a name until the 1980s—at which time it was officially added to the NAD’s Directory—there is a record of its being in use as far back as the July 1927 edition of Science.
