The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla
Dick Cavett
Electronic devices dislike me. There is never a day when something isn’t ailing. Three out of these five implements — answering machine, fax machine, printer, phone and electric can-opener — all dropped dead on me in the past few days.
Now something has gone wrong with all three television sets. They will only get Sarah Palin.
I can play a kind of Alaskan roulette. Any random channel clicked on by the remote brings up that eager face, with its continuing assaults on the English Lang.
There she is with Larry and Matt and just about everyone else but Dr. Phil (so far). If she is not yet on “Judge Judy,” I suspect it can’t be for lack of trying.
What have we done to deserve this, this media blitz that the astute Andrea Mitchell has labeled “The Victory Tour”?
I suppose it will be recorded as among political history’s ironies that Palin was brought in to help John McCain. I can’t blame feminists who might draw amusement from the fact that a woman managed to both cripple the male she was supposed to help while gleaning an almost Elvis-sized following for herself. Mac loses, Sarah wins big-time was the gist of headlines.\
I feel a little sorry for John. He aimed low and missed.
What will ambitious politicos learn from this? That frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences that ramble on long after thought has given out completely are a candidate’s valuable traits?
And how much more of all that lies in our future if God points her to those open-a-crack doors she refers to? The ones she resolves to splinter and bulldoze her way through upon glimpsing the opportunities, revealed from on high.
What on earth are our underpaid teachers, laboring in the vineyards of education, supposed to tell students about the following sentence, committed by the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High and gleaned by my colleague Maureen Dowd for preservation for those who ask, “How was it she talked?”
My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.
And, she concluded, “never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.”
It’s admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any.
Read the whole blog here
http://cavett.blogs.nytimes.com/
A couple of the posted comments to Cavett’s article I like
1. Palin’s patter derives from her most extensive area of training: teen beauty pagent contestant. A contestant is given 90 seconds to respond to a panel’s question. She prepares (is more likely is prepped) by assembling stock answers for rapid delivery. Stock answers are crammed with words and concepts designed to overwhelm the questioners. As the latter are not a PhD panel, the range of acceptable and even “impressive” blurted replies is large.
Palin is captive of that speaking style. It would require pschoanalysis to shift her away from going into overdrive when questioned on a subject of any complexity.
1. Well, as to that whole reason, she’s, you know, just about the only way she KNOWS how to be from her schooling, I mean going to six colleges and getting a journalism only at the end. But gosh, I mean really, can’t we all see that how much she’s done for the base of Lincoln’s party is everyone now knows that even a gal like her can grow up and succeed at success through doors that are open to her, by God! It’s not like, though, we should take for granted that she’s done so much without the benefit of a great language that so many people have shown isn’t even really necessarily mastered besides when they go into politics! Gosh, give her a break here, she’s only tryin’ to say what she meant to say, and not what you’re all trying to tell everyone she was saying anyway.
— Michael Temlin, New York
http://cavett.blogs.nytimes.com/
