26 November 2008
More Palin apologists
Mike Liberman over at Language Log constructs a detailed yet stretchy explanation of how Palin is as talk goodly as everyone else and that it's just nasty transcribers and their punctuation phobias that done did her crooked. He even quotes Camille Paglia's absurdist (true to form) defense of Palin's syntax and prosody as be-bop
(already observed by a jazz pianist so eloquently). What was fresh in Paglia 20 years ago is now merely shrill. Such a grammatic defense is Liberman's shtick, and he wasn't ashamed to try to use it to defend Bush's ignorant ramblings, so I guess I should have expected it. There're few moments when the reply "bullshit" is so appropriate and justified.
That being said, the comments on the page (almost wholly and eloquently against such nonsense) are worth suffering the nonsense. Some choice moments:
The problem is not that she is overly ungrammatical (she isn't) or that she meanders (she does, and so does everyone), it's that she uses a blizzard of words to obscure that she has nothing contentful to say.
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While I agree with your characterization of natural speech as inevitably composed of false starts and abandoned constructions, and further agree that Palin is no worse in this regard than most people or even most politicians, these issues are not, I think, what really bug most of her critics. But since her critics are not linguists, they often lack the tools to accurately describe what they are offended by. They may incorrectly use terms like "ungrammatical" and such when what they are really trying to get at is the feeling that much of her speech is untethered to human thought. More so than most politicians even.
And the continued implication on this blog that the criticism of Palin's speech is completely groundless is frankly bizarre. Palin uses word salad to obscure lack of knowledge. It's the lack of knowledge that people are reacting to and the word salad the proximate mockable evidence.
Palin's manner of speech reminds me of nothing so much as the high school principals, borough council members, and other similar small-town functionaries I've met and dealt with. This isn't a comment on her mayoral past; it's simply that this kind of speaking -- dressing up a few simple and ill-thought-out basic points in a mass of circumlocutions, filler phrases, and slightly misused "advanced" vocabulary -- is one I've encountered most from people who were either in positions of authority, or attempting to sound like they were.