When Bill Clinton told a story about an African-American girl working in a coffee shop, he made a point to call her “really articulate.”

The former president used the description when addressing an audience at Northeast High School in Oklahoma City Sunday night.

“Every time when I can, I’m driving around America, I’ll go in and buy a coffee somewhere and there will inevitably be some young person serving me,” Clinton says at around the 9 minute mark of the speech.

“The other night I was on the way home from New York and I stopped in this coffee shop and this young, really articulate African-American girl — I said, ‘how long you worked here?’

“She said, ‘On and off, five years.’ I’m not making this up.

“I said, ‘what was the off about?’

“She said, ‘That’s when I was going to college. The on was when I had to go pay the debt back.'”

Clinton’s description of a black person as “really articulate” wouldn’t be the first time a Democrat has used such a phrase.

In 2007, Joe Biden was forced to apologize after using similar language to describe Barack Obama.

CNN reported:

In the article published Wednesday, Biden is quoted evaluating presidential rivals Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York, former Sen. John Edwards, D-North Carolina, and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois. His remarks about Obama, the only African-American serving in the Senate, drew the most scrutiny.

“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” Biden said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Biden issued a statement Wednesday afternoon, saying: “I deeply regret any offense my remark in the New York Observer might have caused anyone. That was not my intent and I expressed that to Sen. Obama.”

In recent days, Clinton has raised eyebrows by downplaying Obama as the first black president.

“You know what we learned from the human genome?” Clinton asked an audience in Memphis.

“We learned that unless your ancestors — everyone of you — are 100 percent, 100 percent from sub-Saharan Africa, we are all mixed race people.”