That’s exactly what Deborah Fallows – wife of famed journalist James Fallows – describes in her recent interview on NPR and writes about in her new book Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language.  When Fallows accompanied her husband to China, she had taken a few semesters of Mandarin. But when they arrived, she found it a real challenge to communicate.

Fallows is no stranger to foreign tongues. She earned her Ph.D. in linguistics and speaks half-a-dozen languages.  But she learned there’s an art to mastering a tonal language in which one syllable can have many, many meanings. And more often than not, Fallows felt she was mastering the art of miscommunication.

In one humorous anecdote, the author describes her effort to order “take-out” – or “dabao” from a Shanghai Taco Bell.  She tries every possible tonal combination, but the server couldn’t understand her request. He finally retrieved three other employees from the back, and Fallows continued to repeat dabao, dabao, dabao to them.  Finally – finally! – one of the men said “ah, dabao!”  And, just like that, she struck the chord and got her tacos to go.

For Fallows, hitting the right note was a cultural journey. But in communications, being on-key is everything.  You just can’t afford to be tone-deaf.

It wasn’t just the awkward use of his hands, the hackneyed and inappropriate wartime metaphors, the equally banal “if we could land a man on the moon” drivel. All that was bad enough, but more devastating was the gulf between obvious fact and the speech’s fiction. These — shall we call them misspeakings — were coupled with more of the administration’s increasingly off-putting crisis default setting: That everything bad was Bush’s fault. Our son was two when we stopped accepting that kind of excuse in our house. This administration is almost two, but it’s been talking for longer than our son when we told him to stop the excuses.

Here is a list of questions that occurred to me during the speech and that even the most junior White House speechwriters should have seen as implicit in the text and hit the delete button:

* The speech suggested that the Administration was on top of the oil-spill situation from day one, with the Energy Secretary (co-winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded “for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light”) heading the effort to trap oil gushing from the Gulf floor and floating toward our southern shores. Doesn’t that mean that hundreds of elected officials in the states involved, thousands of journalists, and millions of Americans failed to notice this all out effort until last night?

* The speech started by saluting our “brave men and women in uniform” who are “taking the fight to al Qaeda”. But part of that fight is diverting American oil dollars from the Middle East so they can’t fuel terrorism. In shutting down deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, hasn’t the White House gone AWOL in that part of the battle?

* The speech outlined a course of action that sets aside current laws for dealing with oil spills. Some may say that this emergency is too big to worry about the law, but out of curiosity, what is the White House’s legal authority for demanding that BP put money into an independent escrow account controlled by the government, and insisting that BP pay the wages of those affected by the White House ordered shutdown of deepwater drilling? Other than making the administration look in charge, why was the carefully crafted oil spill law (developed after the wreck of the Exxon Valdez) simply ignored in the week prior to the address in favor of huffing and puffing and threats of boots on the neck and kicked rear ends?

* The speech said that “we are running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water… [a]nd that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean.” Aren’t there hundreds, even thousands, of such sites, but few, if any, for which the U.S. government is willing to issue permits? Wasn’t the speech’s message that the government is going to stick to, not change, that status quo?

* The speech talked about “costs associated with the transition” away from dependence on foreign oil and decried those who say we can’t afford those costs. By halting deep water drilling and pushing all liability onto the oil company involved wasn’t the speech saying that the government would pay no price and bear no burden — even those costs and burdens that its regulations and ineptness impose — to achieve energy independence?

* And to repeat, the speech employed the metaphor of war throughout. In what way is cleaning up a lot of oil like a war, unless the speechwriter intended to suggest KP duty? Is not our real war against global forces that are funded in large part via Middle Eastern money, money that comes from the oil trade? Isn’t using the accident as an excuse for policies that will push drilling out of the United States a form of surrender in that war, the real war?

Here is a lesson I learned writing speeches in the Reagan White House: Public communications is a highly sensitive, delicate thing. If the logic of your text is not tight, if you deviate even slightly from what your audience knows to be true, if in making your case you seem to look down on your audience and try to play slight of hand with their concerns, you are dead in the water.

Last Tuesday night, President Obama was dead in the water.

New scientific research found that children who watched Popeye shoveling spinach into his mouth before fighting his rival Bruto, doubled their vegetable intake. Watching episodes of the cartoon was just part of a larger experiment, conducted by researchers at Mahidol University.  Children also engaged in planting vegetable seeds, fruit and vegetable parties, and cooking with vegetables.

The research concluded that the 26 child volunteers maintained a more visibly healthy diet following their exposure to Popeye.  Experts recorded the four and five year olds eating two portions of vegetables in the days before the study and four portions after watching the cartoon.

Popeye the Sailor Man is credited with saving the spinach industry during the Great Depression. Perhaps re-runs of Popeye is just the policy prescription we need today.

As historian Cindy Aron recounts in her book Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States, the rise of vacations in America is “embedded in a familiar history of the United States,” as we shifted from an agrarian to an industrial nation, developed of a mass-transportation system, and saw the rise of the middle class.  But what’s more interesting about the American story of vacationing is what Aron describes as the “love/hate battle” Americans have with vacations.

Today, as we head off to the beach, everyone grabs blackberries and iPhones, so as never to be out of touch. But what many Americans don’t realize is that the history of our uneasiness toward vacations dates back to even the earliest retreats. In the 19th century, the notion that vacationers were separated from “the discipline of daily work” did more than generate some anxiety. For Americans work “served as the glue that held the republic together and that kept middle-class people on the straight and narrow.”  And so there was the impression among many that vacations were downright dangerous.

In an effort to balance the scales of labor and leisure, Aron explains that Americans have always found ways to combine relaxation with self-improvement. In the 19th century, many wealthy Americans headed to resorts like the Greenbrier in West Virginia, whose mineral springs were viewed as a place for recuperation. Others headed to religious camp meeting grounds in Chautauqua or Martha’s Vineyard, where they could combine spirituality with play.  No matter where they went, Americans have a history of making vacations constructive rather than wasteful.

This past week while my family enjoyed time away at the beach, my husband and I sent emails, worked on proposals, and even found ourselves in a hotel meeting room for a conference call. Certainly today technology makes it easier to stay connected when we’re on vacation. But, as it turns out, there’s something fundamentally American about choosing to labor during times of leisure.

White House Writers Group has been organizing policy dinners for years, but using a meal as a platform to influence opinion has a much longer history in the nation’s capital. Dinner parties in Washington have been the source of politics and politicking since the days of Thomas Jefferson. As Catherine Allgor, the author of Parlor Politics writes, “Historians have long recognized the political advantages of Jefferson’s dinners, calling them part of his statecraft.”

Jefferson was strategic with his dinner parties, giving them throughout the political “season,” or Congressional session.  He typically hosted guests from one political party at a time, careful not to mix Republicans and Federalists.  But these were not official state dinners, the way we’re accustomed to hearing about today. Rather, they were intended to be much more “democratic” and generally reflected the president’s casual, Virginia hospitality.  Jefferson’s dinners espoused democracy, always using a round table, for instance, to encourage easy conversation, intimacy, and equality.

The act of breaking bread with others helps merge the personal with the political, engage in debate, bridge differences, and move opinion.  And in Washington, it appears, we have a long tradition of using food to advance political change.

Now, mid-June, Gallup finds that the President’s job approval rating is 46 percent. Just two days after the President’s Oval Office address, Rasmussen Reports found 61 percent of voters “view the president’s handling of the oil leak crisis as poor.”

Near double-digit unemployment, robust opposition to the health care overhaul, an unrelenting war in Afghanistan, and now the BP oil spill has generated consistent bad press for the president. More and more, his critics claim he is ineffectual.

The president is in trouble, and many wonder whether he can escape from what seems to be political quicksand. No matter the speech he gives, pundits and political elites just keep repeating that he is sinking — and quickly.

In the bible of public-opinion research, The Nature and Origin of Mass Opinion, John Zaller demonstrates that periodically the “flow of political communication really is…heavily one-sided.” By examining shifts in public opinion after the flow of political communication becomes two-sided, he demonstrates that public opinion is the product of information flowing from elites to the masses.

Over the course of the past few months, elite discourse has almost unanimously declared that President Obama is faltering. And critics on both sides have hit the president. Free-marketers have lambasted Obama for the stimulus package, the new health care law, and his decision to stop off-shore drilling in the wake of the oil spill.  But criticism is not limited to the right. The MSNBC chastisement following the president’s address on Tuesday night certainly did not go unnoticed.  In effect, there has been a one-sided, decidedly negative, flow of information to the American public.

One problem Obama is learning is that campaign rhetoric can’t carry a presidency.   As Greg Sargent explains in the Washington Post yesterday, the public doesn’t care that Obama hasn’t shown more emotion or anger over the Gulf oil spill. Rather, they’re “concerned about the substance of the response.”

If the president wants to interrupt the conversation, in which an elite consensus has emerged around the “belief” that Obama is faltering because of his inability to act effectively, he needs to demonstrate his leadership – strongly and consistently. This is the only way he’ll generate a two-sided flow of information and change the conversation.  If he does that, the White House can expect a clear, decisive upswing in the public’s approval of the president.

It’s easy to understand the homogeneous nature of the Broadway community. They work hard to get to the top — usually a lot harder than in the other popular entertainment forms — and the financial rewards and recognition generally don’t match movies, TV etc.

But a speech isn’t just an opportunity to connect with people who share your perspectives. More importantly, it is an opportunity to build bridges to people who don’t share them. In fact, it is more important to communicate with people who don’t immediately or intuitively understand us than those who do. It is to them that ‘attention must be paid’.

A new movement to reinvent the modern American cemetery is making its way across the country.  According to news reports, burial grounds are tired of their teary-eyed reputation, so they’re shedding this forbidding face for something a little, well, livelier.

When it comes down to it, it’s all a matter of perspective.  As one Colorado cemetery manager told a local reporter, “People come to cemeteries, and they are always looking down.”  But if they looked up, they might notice the century old history, plant life and culture that infuse the graveyard.

The trend is not simply to offer tours, like the ones you can arrange at cemeteries like Père Lachaise in Paris or Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington, DC. Instead it’s to turn the focus away from death and toward – for lack of a better word – life.

Fireworks, jazz concerts, and art exhibits are some of the kinds of social events cemeteries are planning to help draw in visitors.  Friends will be encouraged to take pleasure in the historic trees and rose gardens that flank many burial grounds. And many cemeteries are hoping to be a place where communities can gather in times of joy, rather than sorrow.

In Washington, we might call it spin. But cemeteries are refashioning themselves in a new light – hoping they can be a place of solemnity, as well as inspiration.

So what’s the protocol when it comes to giving a speech in the rain? Well, that depends on just how much rain is in the forecast.

Torrential downpours and crashing thunder at Lincoln National Cemetery in Elwood, Illinois yesterday (literally) drowned out President Obama’s Memorial Day remarks.

Politico reports Obama was “huddled under a white tent off to the side of the stage as the rain drove down.” Holding an umbrella, he told service members and their families in attendance, “‘We are a little bit concerned about lightening. This may not be safe.’”

When it was clear the rain wasn’t a passing summer storm, the president canceled the speech and instead visited with audience members inside parked busses.

Of course the president was already under attack for another more serious breach of protocol: shirking his national responsibilities as Commander-in-Chief in favor of a little weekend-getaway back home.

Today, the social secretary just may be looking into some sturdier umbrellas.