I used to do something that astonished my wife and the friends who were exposed to it.

Before I tell you what it is, let me preface this tale by telling you that I'm a six foot white guy with a standard American accent.

Yet when I would speak to my parents, I would unconsciously switch into a distinct German accent. This wasn't done to mock my parents (who both immigrated in the 1950s), but is rather a reflection of the fact that English is my second language, and that the first English I learned had a distinct German cadence and pronunciation. That German accented English is in effect, my native dialect.

When my friends heard me speaking like that, it was for them, like seeing a part of me they never knew existed. I got a lot of ribbing about it, and since my father died, I've lost the reflex to lapse in that speech pattern.

The way we speak is meta data about us. It tells people where we are from, our gender, our race, the kind of education we've had, and even what kind of work we do.

I thought about this after reading a New York Observer article on Kirsten Gillibrand, who if you may recall, was appointed to Hillary Clinton's vacant Senate seat.

“Kirsten Gillibrand has what I would call a non-regional American young female’s accent,” wrote Dr. Bert Vaux, a sociolinguistics scholar at the University of Cambridge, who was asked by The Observer to analyze Ms. Gillibrand’s public speaking. “Though I lack the phonetic expertise to put my finger on what exactly is involved in this, her voice quality is of the sort that is typically associated with pre-workforce-age white American females. Judging by the case of this woman, this speech pattern has now extended into higher age ranges.”

Though Dr. Vaux stressed we should all avoid our “pre-programmed” tendency to form biases based solely on someone’s speech, he noted that Ms. Gillibrand often employs a “rising intonation pattern at the end of declarative clauses that lay people tend to associate with teenage girls,” a tendency that gives way to a “classic trigger of linguistic profiling.”

Translation: She sounds more like the cheerleader than the class president.

Gillibrand 'uptalks', which is damn strange for a 43 year old woman. My 24 year old daughter uptalks, as do many of her peers, but I figured she'd lose it with time and exposure to more normative speech patterns common to most adults.

It makes me wonder where Gillibrand has been spending time before being elevated to the Senate? Immigrant cheerleader parents?

What seemed a mere oddity may well turn out to be a significant deficit as she tries to win her seat in a special election. In a televised debate with carpet-bagger Harold Ford Jr., she's destined to deliver an impression of frivolity, naivete and, well, dumbness.

Some are already condemning this judgment as sexist, but let's recall Harry Reid's observation about Barack Obama (for which the entire black caucus, the Obamas and the liberal white media, gave him as pass...)

"...with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

Barack Obama's accent resembles mine in one aspect--its a conscious creation, not a natural reflection of his regional and racial origins. In effect, he doesn't 'speak black', which went a long ways towards making him acceptable to the American electorate. Its notable that neither Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell sound 'black' either.

Dialect is a fact of American political life, and it seems that this particular fact isn't very friendly towards Kirsten Gillibrand's election prospects.