Earlier this year, I wrote that Boston news outlets were in the right in noting that Aiden Quinn--the T driver responsible for that nasty crash at Government Center--used to be a woman. This upset a number of people, including a reader who commented that--if I wasn't transsexual myself--I had "absolutely no right or privelege to discuss issues of disclosure of trans status."

In an LA Times article that was reprinted in today's Globe, reporter Richard Fausset speculates on the implications of the use of "ain't" by Anh Cao, a Vietnamese-American challenger to Congressman William Jefferson, who's black:

Anh "Joseph" Cao, who hopes to be the first Vietnamese American elected to Congress, was helping a TV interviewer with the pronunciation of his name It's not "cow" but "gow," he explained recently, with a hard G.