Of the alphabetical sequence of adjectives famously applied to Barack Obama by Joseph Biden, bright and clean were awkward enough, but the one that got under my skin was articulate.

Educated black people such as myself are often called “articulate,” and it’s irritating. Contrary to popular misconception, it isn’t racist, but it’s still a nuisance.

There has been a flurry of commentary on Mr. Biden’s use of the word in the press and blogosphere to the effect that when a white person calls a black one articulate, he means “for a black person.” That is, presumably, white people think all black people speak street-corner “Ebonics,” blind to the legions of middle-class and affluent blacks around them speaking Standard English. This blindness is, we are to assume, because of racism.

But the linguistic facts here tell a different story. While only some black people dwell in Ebonics 24/7, the vast majority flows in and out of Black English as various social contexts demand.

So of course the black systems analyst would not say, for instance, “She be the only one ain’t seen nothin'” or “It’s too many people in there be gettin’ all up on you.”

However, she may well say, to a black friend or even to a white person she felt comfortable with, “The reason he says he won’t lend her the money is because he ain’t got no money anyway!” Imagine this not as a disembodied sentence out of a language arts workbook, but said in a fully human, spontaneous way, while, for example, laughing during the last six words.

It is mostly linguists who call this speaking “Black English.” Black people who do not happen to be linguists or teachers often see it as “the way we talk to each other sometimes” or “using slang.” Whatever you call it, it’s real and a dialect of Standard English, and most black people dwell in it to some extent at least. It is a hallmark of black culture, integral to the work of Walter Mosley and Maya Angelou, who nailed it beautifully in a reminiscence: “At school, we might respond with ‘That’s not unusual.'” But in the street, in the same situation, we easily said ‘It be’s like that sometimes.'”

But it does condition a certain problem. The fact is that usages like “He ain’t got none” are regarded as incorrect English by most people — including black people, even if they pepper their speech with such usages here and there. Black people process their “home language” as a kind of permissible relaxation of the rules, as Ms. Angelou indicated — but few contest the validity of the rules overall. Whites don’t either.

As such, one can easily assume that black people have a close relationship to bad grammar without harboring the racist biases that psychologists are so fond of smoking out. Legions of Americans are up in arms about grammatical “mistakes” from people of all walks of life and always have been — no one considers “red-neck” or Southern drawl proper English either, for example.

Towit, what is positively regarded as a key element in the artistry of Alice Walker and Langston Hughes — including by whites — is also considered, in the grammatical sense, improper.

This, then, is why Joseph Biden, seeing a black person speaking nothing but Standard English, with no Black English drop-ins and no black “sound,” sees that black person as “articulate” for a black person. What’s a black sound? Well, things like tellin’ instead of telling, which sounds “inarticulate” to laymen because they process it as “dropping a letter” — also a mistaken impression, but it would require another column to explain.

This perception of Black English as a degraded form of Standard English is not only unfortunate but also scientifically mistaken. Black English is no more a degraded version of Standard English than a collie is a degraded version of a German shepherd. This is a matter of universal consensus among linguists. In comparison to many whites, black people speak “a larger English,” as the working title went of a book I once wrote on the subject.

But that message has only penetrated so far beyond the halls of academe. For now, we are stuck with an America where someone like me, so often termed “articulate,” is, in fact, no more articulate than the typical Ph.D.

Once or twice I have even taken a look at myself on TV after an appearance that has netted an unusual weight of “articulate” compliments. And I see someone speaking no less, but no more deftly than, say, historian Michael Beschloss. People like him and author and linguist Deborah Tannen aren’t called “articulate” nearly as much as I am. It’s not considered news that a white academic will know how to rub a noun and a verb together.

As for whether I process being labeled with the A-word, “racism,” please. I have a real life to live. However, it will always feel more or less like being complimented for wearing pants.

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.