Dumb It Down, Mr. President

President Barack Obama's speech on Tuesday night has garnered some negative reviews, not so much due to the message itself - that's inconsequential, after all - as much as the difficult language used by our Commander-in-Chief. Paul Payack, the president of Global Language Monitor, a Texas-based company that analyzes the cultural impact of word choices, considered President Obama's speech to have been written at a 9.8 grade level.

In other words, you probably had to have gone to high school in order to understand it.

Here's a sentence from President Obama's speech, chosen by Mr. Payack as particularly difficult to follow:

"That is why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation's best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge - a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation's secretary of energy."

On the other hand, a phrase like "oil began spewing" was supposedly more comprehensible.

Perhaps it is because English is not my native language, or that I never experienced the American public education system first-hand, but I did not find President Obama's speech difficult to follow. In my opinion, that sentence which Mr. Payack singled out, is simple and to the point.

I am, quite frankly, disturbed by the notion that the President of the United States should dumb down and simplify his speeches to match the intellects of the academically uninspired. I would go so far as to suggest that the "leader of the free world" should be speaking at a 10th grade level or higher.

Perhaps we got spoiled by those eight years with Bush.