Headline - 'Conclusion: Sarah Palin Speaks Like A Toddler'

[PoliCon]

By Noel Sheppard (Bio | Archive)
Tue, 04/06/2010 - 20:20 ET

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"Conclusion: Sarah Palin Speaks Like A Toddler."

Such is the title of a Mediaite piece published Tuesday which badly cherry-picked a rather comprehensive analysis of the former Alaska governor's speech patterns.

To make her demeaning point about Palin, author Glynnis MacNicol offered her readers a grand total of six sentences from John McWhorter's 2500-word piece published at The New Republic.

Maybe even worse, her well thought out analysis of the linguist's work was economically presented in only five sentences. Here were the first four:
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Brave soul, linguist, and conservative political commentator John McWhorter attempts to answer the eternal question: What is Sarah Palin talking about?

Actually, it's more like what version of the English language is Sarah Palin using, because it's not one most of us are familiar with, as anyone who has been required to transcribe a Palin speech is painfully aware. McWhorter, however, sees a strange problem that goes far beyond Palin's habit of being "folksy," something that he finds little fault with. At one point he compares her language skills to that of a toddler.

To prove this, MacNicol offered the following two paragraphs of McWhorter's:

Rather, Palin is given to meandering phraseology of a kind suggesting someone more commenting on impressions as they enter and leave her head rather than constructing insights about them. Or at least, insights that go beyond the bare-bones essentials of human cognition — an entity (i.e. something) and a predicate (i.e. something about it).
[...]
This reminds me of toddlers who speak from inside their own experience in a related way: they will come up to you and comment about something said by a neighbor you’ve never met, or recount to you the plot of an episode of a TV show they have no way of knowing you’ve ever heard of. Palin strings her words together as if she were doing it for herself — meanings float by, and she translates them into syntax in whatever way works, regardless of how other people making public statements do it.

Problem is there are 18 paragraphs and 1,255 words BETWEEN these two quotes, or roughly half the article.

Now THAT'S what I call cherry-picking.

With this in mind, let's take a look at some of the paragraphs MacNicol conveniently ignored:

The easy score is to flag this speech style as a sign of moronism. But we have to be careful — there is a glass houses issue here. Before parsing Palinspeak we have to understand the worldwide difference between spoken and written language — and the fact that in highly literate societies, we tend to have idealized visions of how close our speech supposedly is to the written ideal.

Namely, linguists have shown that spoken utterances — even by educated people (that is, even you) — average seven to ten words. We speak in little packets. And the result is much baggier than we think of language as being, because we live under the artificial circumstance of engaging language so much on the page, artificially enshrined, embellished, and planned out. That’s something only about 200 languages out of 6000 have been subjected to in any real way, and widespread literacy is a human condition only a few centuries old in most places.

CONTINUED

[Gingersnap]

Interesting. Neither author could bring themselves to point out that some of Palin's speech traits are very, very much female. Many female politicians deliberately scrub any characteristic female traits from their oratory style. Yet women speak almost a different language from men in terms of cadence, tone, and word frequency.

[lacarnut]

Interesting. Neither author could bring themselves to point out that some of Palin's speech traits are very, very much female. Many female politicians deliberately scrub any characteristic female traits from their oratory style. Yet women speak almost a different language from men in terms of cadence, tone, and word frequency.

That plus the fact that she speaks in common sense and simplistic terms which is so uncharacteristic of politicians that it boggles the mind of both liberal and RINO talking heads. She is a voice of reason that baffles opponets and energizes conservatives.

[NJCardFan]

Once again, if this woman is so irrelevant, why does the left spend so much time trying to smear her?

[CaughtintheMiddle1990]

Once again, if this woman is so irrelevant, why does the left spend so much time trying to smear her?

Maybe they secretly like her. Surely like they know that by smearing her they are not only making her seem like a battered, mistreated martyr, which would create sympathy amongst voters, but it also gives her something much better: Exposure. The more they mention her, the more people who know her name. They are ironically helping her. Like Nixon. The more they put him down in the 60s after the election as a crazy, a ''right wing loon'', etc the more exposure he got, and so he was never truly ''in the wilderness.''
I don't think Palin is anywhere as smart as Nixon or politically adept, but...If she becomes a little more eloquent and articulate, she could have a Nixon-esque comeback.

[lacarnut]

Once again, if this woman is so irrelevant, why does the left spend so much time trying to smear her?

While most conservative politicians are for smaller gov., she is the only one that will fight for it. The rest of them give lip service. This scares the living daylights out of liberals and a shitpot of Republicians. Saying no to pet projects, eliminating agencies, curbing spending is not in the DNA of 99% of politicians .

[noonwitch]

While most conservative politicians are for smaller gov., she is the only one that will fight for it. The rest of them give lip service. This scares the living daylights out of liberals and a shitpot of Republicians. Saying no to pet projects, eliminating agencies, curbing spending is not in the DNA of 99% of politicians .

She only scares dumb liberals. The rest of us hope you all make her the GOP nominee in 2012. Unless there is another terrorist attack on the homeland or the seeming economic recovery falters, Sarah at the top of the GOP ticket is the best way to insure a second Obama term.

[AmPat]

She only scares dumb liberals. The rest of us hope you all make her the GOP nominee in 2012. Unless there is another terrorist attack on the homeland or the seeming economic recovery falters, Sarah at the top of the GOP ticket is the best way to insure a second Obama term.

In other words: ensuring the complete demise of the USA as we know it. If this is your hero, don't dare bitch about the destruction of this country.:mad:

[Chuck58]

She only scares dumb liberals. The rest of us hope you all make her the GOP nominee in 2012. Unless there is another terrorist attack on the homeland or the seeming economic recovery falters, Sarah at the top of the GOP ticket is the best way to insure a second Obama term.

Sad, but in my opinion true. I like her, I'd support her and I'd vote for her, but she wouldn't have a prayer.

In the last election, the dems ran against Palin, with their 'heartbeat away from the Presidency' message, slurs and attacks on her and her family. I think some people forgot that mccain was the Republican candidate. Imagine what the democratic campaign will be like if she's first on the ticket.

There are a few good Republican candidates out there. They need more exposure to become known. I think - pray - that obama is a one termer.

[lacarnut]

She only scares dumb liberals. The rest of us hope you all make her the GOP nominee in 2012. Unless there is another terrorist attack on the homeland or the seeming economic recovery falters, Sarah at the top of the GOP ticket is the best way to insure a second Obama term.

Dream on. The more dumb asses like you dump on her, the higher her rating go and the lower the Zero and his band of clowns in Congress go down.

Surely you jest about the economic recovery. With taxes going up on health care in a few months, unemployment sky high and more gov. takeovers, business will not expand. Don't know what planet you are living on but the seeming economic recovery is non existant. The only hope of a second term for the Magic Negro is that the Repubs take over the House and Senate by huge majorities and force him to lower taxes like what happened in 1994. If that does not happen, it will be the "economy stupid" doing a tap dance on Obama's political grave.