re: Does anyone here speak Miles?

quote:

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I have no trouble understanding Miles. I had the good fortune to not be educated in Louisiana, so that gives me an unfair advantage.

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I was educated in La. AND I still have no problem understanding Miles.

I also have the vantage point of having been a public speaker for many years and I know what it means to address large audiences.

There is a reason the VAST majority of human beings place public speaking as a greater fear than death - it is not easy.

Miles may stumble from time to time with some of his words but not nearly as bad as people make it out.

Moreover, I have met the man and have been in full length press conferences with him and he expresses himself quite well.

I have also seen his words in print and out of context when it is easy to make anyone look bad and for some reason LSU fans can't wait to make their own coach look bad.

It is actually rather sad.

What is even sadder, however, is that many of these people (that criticize Miles unmercifully) speak with a broken English dialect that is unintelligible to MOST of the world outside of Bayou country.

When I moved away from Baton Rouge for the first time I always wondered why nearly everyone I came in contact with continually asked me to repeat myself.

They simply didn’t understand my accent and dialect. I had a girlfriend that was getting her Master’s at Emory and she started taping me and playing back my own words to me to help me appreciate how I sounded to everyone else.

It helped me change so that now I don’t even have a southern draw (not much anyway) and people are shocked when I tell them I am from Louisiana. I also could not have been successful in my profession or in life had I not changed.

So it makes me laugh when a bunch of Cajun talking nut jobs criticize a man’s speech that has a degree in economics, has reached the very pinnacle of his profession, and has been a public speaker for 20+ years.

Yall aint fixin’ to do nuti’n as impotant as dat man has already done did in his day, no cher.