“You shouldn’t be governor unless you can pronounce the name of the state.” If a Republican had made this wisecrack, you can be sure the California media wouldn’t have wasted any time chasing him out of the state as an immigrant-hating bigot, to say nothing of Democrats. But Democratic Gov. Gray Davis uttered it, in an obvious reference to the GOP’s Ahh-nold Schwartzenegger, and so it attracts only a little notice and hardly any censure. Shouldn’t Hispanic advocacy groups be up in arms? The double standard is maddening, but Republicans who support the actor perhaps may take heart from new research on language and communication: “People speaking English as a second language find each other just as intelligible as they do native English speakers, US linguists have found. … A foreign accent hinders a native but helps a fellow non-native.” What’s more, it doesn’t matter if speaker and listener have different first languages–the way an Austrian says California may sound perfectly intelligible to a Mexican, even if the pronunciation grates at Gray Davis.