esrosedotblog

I am a sucker for the Obama human interest story.

Honoring Small Business, Obamas Go Book Shopping

There aren't many. He has been shut up too long in the White prison.

He has been here a couple of times and, because we are used to Presidents, he has been welcomed as a friend. The accouterments of the Presidency are dropped pretty quickly and even though Air Force One stays ready on the tarmac right near my gym, the gloss falls away rather quickly and he is just a normal guy who we hope retires here. We are the place that Eisenhower and Ford moved to so we are particularly anxious to have a Democrat.

The Obamas have friends in Rancho Mirage, not exactly a mixed neighborhood, but he has ascended to the special class of resident which has our eye but also a live and let live attitude.

Here he is buying books at a small store in Washington. It is a nice playful article and brings out the best of how we view our leaders. No pomp. Lots of protection obviously, but the girls were there (nearly women now) and they obviously had a good time.

Don't worry, there were surely a lot of eyes looking to see any flaw. The smile is intact and while the hair is grayer. I predicted that, he is as jaunty and happy as ever. The happy warrior. Like FDR.

Did I spell grey right? Gray? Shit. I don't have that down after all these years.

From the Grammarist:

Gray and grey are different spellings of the same word, and both are used throughout the English-speaking world. But gray is more common in American English, while grey is more common in all the other main varieties of English. In the U.K., for instance, grey appears about twenty times for every instance of gray. In the U.S. the ratio is reversed.

Both spellings, which have origins in the Old English grǽg, have existed hundreds of years.1 Grey gained ascendancy in all varieties of English in the early 18th century, but its dominance as the preferred form was checked when American writers adopted gray about a century later. As the Ngram below shows, this change in American English came around 1825. Since then, both forms have remained fairly common throughout the English-speaking world, but the favoring of gray in the U.S. and grey everywhere else has remained consistent.

That is Robert Gates' book. An obvious plug for the former SecDef.

Labels: Barack Obama