11.15.08
Fractured English
Who am I talking about? Sarah Palin, of course. In an blog post on the New York Times site, Dick Cavett, a man who knows how to turn a phrase, writes about Sarah Palin, a woman who appears to have no first language. She is a woman of many words, but unfortunately does not seem to be able to assemble them into coherent sentences. Just in case you didn’t notice.
Everybody has completely missed the point of her grammar. The “language” she is using only consists of syntactically correct sentences when she is reciting memorized talking points or speeches. When speaking extemporaneously in response to questions (real questions, that is), she appears to speak a mishmash of seemingly randomly-chosen words and phrases. It sounds like language, but it is not.
Like any good Pentecostal, she is speaking in tongues.
