The "Obama Pause"--is that a thing? It was a thing in this 2017 Twitter message from the business-oriented "Inc." magazine, which publishes online and also has a print edition.



They had an article about it: "Want to Be a Brilliant Public Speaker? Take a Cue From One of President Obama's Quirks."

quote Love him or hate him, President Obama's predictable habit of hesitating when talking speaks volumes about his intelligence and communication genius.

Big History can't vouch for all of that--it's outside of Big History's remit--but the article focuses on Obama's proclivity for cadencing his speeches and remarks with silence. Here's some of the article:

quote When most people talk, they naturally make use of filler words and phrases like "um", "well" and "you know". Fillers serve a variety of functions, including signaling that you're not finished with your turn in a conversation and giving clues to listeners about your mental state (e.g., anxious, humble). But they also have a cognitive function, buying you time to remember and think. Award-winning speaker Steven D. Cohen of Harvard University acknowledges the cognitive value of fillers. But as Toastmasters International points out, too many fillers can distract your audience. That's why so many speech experts recommend trying to eliminate them from your conversations or presentations. Cohen asserts that the easiest way to do this is to pause. Now, you're probably thinking, "But I can't pause! Pausing will make me seem inarticulate!" But according to Toastmasters, this fear is pretty unfounded. It asserts that pauses actually are more impressive than fillers, because listeners know that you're trying to find the right thing to say in a more controlled way, and they respect that process. When President Obama sprinkles pauses through what he says, he's demonstrating that he's confident enough to embrace silence, has an acute awareness of the attention of his audience and is intelligently thinking through what he says. And when he pauses, you can mentally and emotionally process what he's saying more deeply, too. With practice, you can come across the same way.

Wanda Thibodeaux for "Inc."; January 13, 2017.
https://www.inc.com/wanda-t...ident-obamas-qu.html

The bespectacled Late Show host Stephen Colbert skewered the "Obama Pause" in a friendly way.


Once the "Obama Pause" is mentalized, it's impossible for Big History not to connect with the long running meme that was popularized by the Coca-Cola company. A meme, long before any ordinary person ("ordinary person" as distinguished from a linguist or other language specialist or academic) would ever have thought of, spoken or written the word "meme." Maybe before the word "meme" could fairly be said to have been a word, although Big History leaves that to be pondered (perhaps) on some other day.



After reading (presumably) an essay from Dinesh D'Souza that was published in Forbes, "How Obama Thinks", Newt Gingrich, somewhat famously, said this:

quote [That's the] most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama. . . . What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.

Max Fisher for The Atlantic; September 13, 2010.
https://www.theatlantic.com...de-criticism/344210/

From Newt Gingrich's "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior" to Obama, birtherism and Donald J. Trump--Big History connects, with another article from The Atlantic.

quote The conspiracy theories surrounding Obama’s birthplace and religion were much more than mere lies. They were ideology.

"Birtherism of a Nation."
Adam Serwer for The Atlantic; May 13, 2020.
https://www.theatlantic.com...sm-and-trump/610978/

Kenya is close to or perhaps even part of the natural habitat of a particular riverine fish species of some note:

quote Professor Jason Gallant of Michigan State University studies a strange-looking group of fishes from African rivers called elephantfishes. Gallant keeps a few species of elephantfish at his laboratory, and recently turned over the light controls of his lab’s Christmas tree to these fish—which have the ability to produce electrical signals.

quote The species controlling these lights is Brienomyrus brachyistius, a species of elephantfish found in West and Central Africa, from the Democratic Republic of Congo north to Gambia.

Ben Young Landis for the "Better Know a Fish" blog; December 18, 2014.
https://betterknowafish.com...omyrus-brachyistius/

Jason Gallant isn't the only scientist with an interest in Brienomyrus brachyistius and Big History turns--once again--to The Atlantic magazine.



Here's how that begins:

quote In many, many ways, fish of the species Brienomyrus brachyistius do not speak at all like Barack Obama. For starters, they communicate not through a spoken language but through electrical pulses booped out by specialized organs found near the tail. Their vocabulary is also quite unpresidentially poor, with each individual capable of producing just one electric wave—a unique but monotonous signal. “It’s even simpler than Morse code,” Bruce Carlson, a biologist at Washington University in St. Louis who studies Brienomyrus fish, told me. In at least one significant way, though, fish of the species Brienomyrus brachyistius do speak a little bit like Barack Obama. When they want to send an important message . . . they stop, just for a moment. Those gaps tend to occur in very particular patterns, right before fishy phrases and sentences with “high-information content” about property, say, or courtship, Carlson said. Electric fish have, like the former president, mastered the art of the dramatic pause—a rhetorical trick that can help listeners cue in more strongly to what speakers have to say next, Carlson and his colleagues report in a study published today in Current Biology.

"Can Electric Fish Talk Like Obama? Yes, they can."
Katherine J. Wu for The Atlantic; May 26, 2021.
https://www.theatlantic.com...c-fish-pause/618993/


Big History--after an Obama-esque pause for dramatic effect--abides.

[This message has been edited by rinselberg (edited 05-27-2021).]

[This message has been edited by sourmash (edited 05-27-2021).]

quote Originally posted by rinselberg: ... and Big History turns..... Big History can't vouch for all of that--it's outside of Big History's remit Big History--after an Obama-esque pause for dramatic effect.....

WTF is this "Big History" bullshit now?

Is that your new version of the "Rinsel World" and "Radio Free Rinsel" nonsense that you spammed the livin' crap out of OPTIBOARD with?

Sure looks like history repeating itself.

[This message has been edited by randye (edited 05-27-2021).]

[This message has been edited by randye (edited 05-27-2021).]