A last note on 'articulate'

You hesitate a little in this blogging game and somebody says what you were going to say, and they even do it better sometimes. Dennis Baron's Web of Language post on 'articulate' gets at a point I was chewing on, and he does it better — here. I had been trying to figure out the meaning of this anonymous comment on this post when Nancy's very smart comment here nailed the point: The relevant use of 'articulate' has nothing to do with speaking readily or well, it means 'to sound white'. Nancy's absolutely right that this is the only view of the world in which Al Sharpton is not articulate and Condi Rice is. Couldn't wrap my brain around such a semantic shift.

The closing footnote to this topic, I suppose, is that dictionaries need to update their definitions. UrbanDictionary.com does not yet include this one, it looks like.