Embedding a video

I am going to show students how to embed a video into their posts, like this one:



It's fairly simple.

But while I'm at it, I might as well post an observation on this random YouTube selection I chose to embed. Obama's speech clip illustrates several of the (sometimes paralinguistic) elements of Obama's speaking style (use of voice/tone to convey confidence, emphasis on "we"and "our" to solidify identification with his audience) that contribute to his percieved effectiveness. Still, (and I was truly shocked when I found out that his speech writer is 27 years old), he rattles off a list of binaries in this clip that, if examined closely, indicate just how deeply embedded non-neutral language is in our culture. For example, he makes the point that Americans from diverse walks of life have come together to prove that change is possible: these diverse groups include young/old, white/black/Hispanic/Asian, rich/poor; however, while this list of groups seems fairly obvious, he also include "gay/straight", and "disabled/non-disabled"--and although I am not here to go on a language police rant, I do want to point out that the gay/straight dichotomy has been cited as one that, through the metaphor of heterosexual=straight, gay=bent/crooked, presents an image of gays/lesbians as deviant. Likewise, the disabled/non-disabled dichotomy does something similar in defining a whole person as disabled (or not), rather than a person who has a disability. And yes, I understand that rephrasing those last two binaries would have thrown off the rhetorical flourish of the parallel structure.

Now, one could simply sigh and say, "But don't you get the point of what he's saying?" I absolutely do. It's all about inclusion and collective responsibility in achieving goals: awesome. But at the same time, those phrases, those tiny phrases, still bear some scrutiny--and I wonder just how much a 27 year old is aware of the impact of those seeminlgy infinitesmal phrases when taken in the context of a whole speech--language does, in fact, shape our reality.

Alas, "now is the time for all good rhetoricians to come to the aid of their country..."