you talk about not being able to hear the “ck”, but for the life of me, no matter what version I listen to, I just cannot hear the “y” sound you insist is there. Is it supposed to rhyme with “fly”, or is it a different pronunciation?
edited to add: And now you add the possibility that the first consonant might be “p”? Where in the world are you getting that from?
What?
I’m not even going to get into whether Santorum said “Black” or not, but I don’t know how you can read the two statements below and not think they mean pretty much the same thing.
“why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” Gingrich.
“I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.” Santorum
There is no question I can behave like an asshole. The question is whether to trust people who claim not hear the “b” the “l” the “ah” and “ck”. It is like Winston Smith in 1984 finally denying that four fingers are being held up. But without being tortured first. Who are these losers who distort reality to bend over backwards and torture sound and logic? It’s a Jedi mind trick: “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” Um, yeah, they are. What are they doing? Listening to it so often that they hypnotize themselves into giving the guy the benefit of the doubt? Remove all politics from it and all the scrutiny, and report on the sentence as if it were just heard and had no special meaning, as if it were said by fellow at a coffee shop. Don’t play it over and over. Pretend there is no controversy over the subject. Just repeat the sentence your acquaintance said a moment ago when the whole world isn’t watching. Better yet, play the tape.
Okay, if you just look at those sentences out of context, they’re the same.
Like, they saw a bla’ man getting the shit kicked out of him?
I speak English. I’m from England. And I, like everyone else I’ve ever met in my entire life, have incorporated “glottal stops” into my speech to smooth over hard consonants so that I don’t sound like a robot. In all seriousness, is it common practice in America to hit every single consonant? Would you pronounce the t at the end of the word ‘Thought’, for instance?
Look, it’s clear that this is a really boring conversation and not worth having. Just accept that, to me, and a great many others, it really sounds a lot more like Santorum is saying “black” than “blag”, or “blah”, or anything else. It just does.
Furthermore, accept that this interpretation makes sense to us, based on our knowledge of the wingnut view of welfare, which is that it’s just a great big liberal honeytrap for stupid, lazy blacks. Please further note that there’s quite a lot of overlap between the type of people who go in for stupid shit like that, and the type of people who vote for arch conservative scumbags like Rick Santorum
That’ll save some time.
Clearly. So why are people lying again?
Oh sorry, you’re right. That was last year. I’m one of those folks that won’t get around to putting 2012 on their letterhead until around May.
This is clearly a case of the pot calling the kettle bly.
I know that you are lying because I compare what you write with the videotaped record. I don’t know what you are thinking or what your motivations are and I am disinclined to engage in speculation.
Why are you lying?
What are your motives?
Okay, that is funny.
For the record, I do not hear any word other than “black”. My point was how anyone can go from their first impression of “black” to playing it dozens of times, giving the guy the benefit of the doubt, and then not only denying he said black, but that they heard it that way the first time and that other people might. It is like a magic trick. Or the Big Lie propaganda technique. These are not the droids you are looking for.
Yes, I’m saying I hear a long i like in fly.
It sounds more like a b to me, but since the corrected version of the sentence was “I don’t want to make people’s lives easier,” I’m saying maybe it was a p.
No, it isn’t. But glottal stops are audible, so this is making me wonder if you know waht they are. If we pretend Santorum was saying “black people,” the “ck” sound isn’t altered to a glottal stop, it disappears. A glottal stop doesn’t make “black people” and “sick people” into “bla people” and “si people.” The glottal stop in “thought” means the t isn’t fully pronounced, but it doesn’t mean there is no sound there. Otherwise “thought” would be identical to “thaw.”
I understand the wingnut view of welfare. The problem is that he wasn’t talking about welfare in the first place, and you have to torture things pretty hard to go from “he said department of welfare when he meant HHS, which means that when he says [bl] people, he meant black people” even though that doesn’t make sense in the context of what he was saying and he immediately goes back and restarts the phrase without saying “black,” which makes you wonder if it was supposed to be some kind of subliminal message or something.
This comes pretty close to “Rick Santorum said this because guys like Rick Santorum believe stuff like this.”
I am asking you what you think my motives are, you nitwit.
I’m sorry, but I swear I can hear it. We’re just gonna have to differ on this.
Then lets not mix up what you thought you heard with with what you think they were trying to say, please. If you thought you heard the “b” sound, then please stick with that. By the way, concerning this “corrected version”-is anybody officially with Santorum’s group saying that he meant to say “people” instead of whatever it was that came out of his mouth?
Being a central PA native (and, theoretically, a native of Santorum Country…eesh, that sounds bad), I want to weigh in on this, but I can’t. The whole thing just is so damn ridiculous. “Did he say ‘black people’?” “Is there a K in there or not?” “The 14th time I heard it, I thought he said ‘black’, but by try number 27 I was sure it was ‘bly’!” The thing is, it’s true, we Pennsyltuckians are mushmouthed by nature. Let us not forget that even Mushmouth himself was a Keystoner, inasmuch as Philly is part of the state and not in and of itself.
So I’m totally willing to believe that Santorum meant to say “Don’t give lazy poor people money to better themselves” and it came out “Don’t give bly poor people…” I mean it happens. The phonemes are right next to each other. It’s like if I tried to type “former Senator” and instead I came up with “frothy mixture.” I’m sure how it’s that whole Dan Savage thing started, just from an insane typo. Well I’m here to tell you that Santorum had a mouth typo. I’m looking forward to a whole lot of Santorum mouth typos during the campaign, when things like “I believe Griswold v. Connecticut is settled law, though I don’t personally agree with it” come out as “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country.” Oh, those mouth typos.
In conclusion: blyte people, why people, Poor Ricas, Samoas…do the Humpty Hump.
The psychological mechanism has to explain why some people insist a disputed sound is not a word, while others clearly hear a word, and then they insist the others must be wrong, and are biased in their interpretation. In other words, they are saying “It sounds like ‘bly’ to me, and anyone who disagrees is wrong, and incapable of thinking clearly”. I assume they think all of reality conforms to their perceptions. It’s much too easy and too human to be simply wrong about something. You have to really work at it to be wrong and be an asshole about it.
Mate, it’s as clear as what you’re seeing in this picture. The mind fills in details all the time. Listen to the sound one more time–you can hear him catch himself. I don’t know WHAT words he was stumbling on, but stumble he did.
Aww, but everybody else is doing it! 
I’m not talking about what Santorum’s people said. In the clip, he says “I don’t want to make [BL] people’s lives better by giving them someone else’s money.” The sensible reading is that he was trying to say “people’s lives,” tripped over his tongue, and went back and said “people’s lives.”
I hate Rick Santorum. I find him the single most loathesome politician currently on the national stage, and his backwardly evil social views are almost enough to make me physically ill. I wish he would vanish down the nation’s collective memory hole, never to be seen again.
I also don’t think he said “black,” and here’s why: I verbally fumble in that exact same way, with reasonable frequency, when my brain outraces my mouth.
I just listened to the clip for the first time, five minutes ago. I closed my eyes and tried to be as objective as I could. My instinctive first impression was that he was trying to say: “I don’t want to make people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money…” but that his brain had moved on to “lives” and “better” by the time his mouth reached “make.” He combined the first letters in the next couple of words, made a “bl” sound, caught himself, and went on with his speech. I do that exact same thing… I end up mashing together the first letters from words I plan on saying later in the sentence. When Santorum said what he said, that was the first thing that occured to me. “Oh, he did that thing where his mouth is catching up to his brain.”
Of course, I can’t prove that; it’s just an opinion. And now I hate Santorum even more, because it means we have something in common, which grosses me out.
I can only assume that it is your well-known love for Rick Santorum that is leading you astray.
[Runs, hides ]