Zadie Smith, a woman who knows how you’re meant to speak in tutorials, even if the way you speak it is, at best, an approximation of those beside you who seem born to the task:

We feel that our voices are who we are, and that to have more than one, or to use different versions of a voice for different occasions, represents, at best, a Janus-faced duplicity, and at worst, the loss of our very souls.

Like her, my first thought with regard to Obama was his grasp of register; an apprehension which, to be done properly, must always be both conscious and unconscious.