“What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility,” President Obama declared, “a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world….”

What, precisely, do these tired words mean?

How would the President define our “duties to ourselves” --- to brush our teeth, to exercise regularly, to avoid contracting sexually transmitted disease? And what are the duties of “every American” to “the world”? Does this suggest that we must support the U.N., or give generously to international charities, or drive more fuel efficient vehicles, or all of the above?

When his text elaborates on these “duties” that characterize our “new era of responsibility,” Mr. Obama says merely that they are “duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.”

This rhetoric counts as worse than empty and meaningless (what is the “difficult task” to which we give “our all”?) but even sinks to the level of embarrassing grammatical sloppiness. A decent editor would instantly correct the conclusion of Mr. Obama’s paragraph to read that “there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit …as giving our all to a difficult task,” or else modifying it to declare that “there is nothing more satisfying to the spirit…than giving our all to a difficult task.” As any middle school English teacher (yes, I plied that trade more than thirty years ago) could explain, the “nothing so satisfying” simply doesn’t fit with “than giving our all.”

Additionally, in this tortured and utterly hopeless swamp of a sentence, there’s a glaring disagreement between “spirit” (which is singular) and “giving our all” (which is plural, obviously).

Given that dozens of advisors and wordsmiths either helped to craft or at least reviewed the most momentous utterance of the President’s life so far, and given that he has always made a fetish of promising educational rigor and excellence, this shabby writing becomes inexplicable if not inexcusable. At least his notorious previous puzzlement “We are the change we have been waiting for!” brought a Zen-like mystery to its inscrutability. Here, the wording counts as not just imprecise but downright puerile.

In other words, Barack Obama hardly lived up to his advance-billing as an immortal rhetorician in the tradition of Lincoln and Churchill. Several weeks before the speech, Sandy Grady in USA TODAY enthused that the president-elect’s words “were glorious and lyrical as a jazz solo in a 2 a.m. nightclub....It’s a relief to have a president who can use language as precisely as a concert violinist playing a Bach sonata….Obama will be the best combination writer-orator in more than a century.”

This means that Grady predicted that Obama’s eloquence would exceed that of Woodrow Wilson (a lousy president but a remarkably gifted writer), FDR, Truman, JFK, Nixon (another controversial chief executive who could write memorable speeches on big occasions), and Ronald Reagan.

In the aftermath of the new president’s disappointing inaugural rhetoric, this prophecy looks every bit as ridiculous as the cultish songs and videos by besotted Hollywood celebs who pledge to become loyal “servants to our president.”

Even so, the mundane verbiage of his speech couldn’t destroy the undeniable grandeur of the occasion that called it forth. Yes, most of the nation thrilled to a fresh start with a dynamic new leader, the obvious (and endlessly celebrated) racial breakthrough that his ascension validated, and a smooth, cordial transfer of power, even as it struggled to remember anything truly significant orator Obama actually managed to say.