The New Republic: Sarah Palin speaks like a toddler!

[Bluebear]

...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.

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"We realize that more and more Americans are starting to see the light there and understand the contrast. And we talk a lot about, OK, we're confident that we're going to win on Tuesday, so from there, the first 100 days, how are we going to kick in the plan that will get this economy back on the right track and really shore up the strategies that we need over in Iraq and Iran to win these wars?"

Just forty years ago people would be shocked to read something like this as a public statement from someone even pretending, as Palin pretty much had to have been by the time of this quote, that they were going to be serving in a Presidential Administration.

It’s not quite Bushspeak, which, with the likes of “I know what it’s like to put food on my family,” was replete with flagrantly misplaced words with a frequency that made for guesses, not completely in jest, that he might suffer from a mild form of Wernicke’s aphasia, interfering with matching word shapes to meanings. (Bush the father wasn’t much better in this regard—there just wasn’t an internet to make collecting the slips and spreading them around so easy.)

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)....

The modern American typically relates warmly to the use of English to the extent that it summons the oral — “You betcha,” “Yes we can!” -- while passing from indifference to discomfort to the extent that its use leans towards the stringent artifice of written language. As such, Sarah Palin can talk, basically, like a child and be lionized by a robust number of perfectly intelligent people as an avatar of American culture. And linguistically, let’s face it: she is.

http://www.tnr.com/blog/john-mcwhorter/what-does-palinspeak-mean

[XOKCowboy]

1. So true. I miss the election just for her sound bites.

I swear she can't appear on camera without shooting herself in the foot/mouth. Of course it is scary that a large number of people actually think she'd make a good leader of any country.

[Swamp Rat]

2. *ow!*

I just lost a brain cell.

[pnorman]

4. Thanks for that image!

The afterimage will probably persist for several hours after I shut my eyes!

[Bluebear]

7. another great creation :)

[ChicagoSuz219]

3. She should be given more credit...

...she just wrote Tina Fey's speech for SNL next Saturday:


"We realize that more and more Americans are starting to see the light there and understand the contrast. And we talk a lot about, OK, we're confident that we're going to win on Tuesday, so from there, the first 100 days, how are we going to kick in the plan that will get this economy back on the right track and really shore up the strategies that we need over in Iraq and Iran to win these wars?"


You betcha!! ;-) ;-)

[RM33]

5. Why do Republicans like the uneducated?

It's strange, but, the Red states seem to like politicians that are not that smart. George Bush can not speak English. And Palin seems worse than Bush.

[Bluebear]

8. They're so "common" and "just like us"

:eyes:

[pinboy3niner]

6. "She doesn't seem to have a first language"

That's what Dick Cavett said about Sarah Palin during the campaign.:rofl:

[Bluebear]

9. That is AWESOME! And wecome to DU!

[pinboy3niner]

13. Thanks, Bluebear!

[old mark]

10. Rec. The elevation of a complete jerk-Palin-to the VP candidacy is an great insult to

everyone before who held or ran for that office, no matter what party. It is an insult to the American people that a major party would even consider such a person fit for office especially given McCain's age and the possibility of Palin actually becoming President.

Does anyone with any intelligence seriously believe her competent to lead our country? Personally, I have problems seeing her as a school crossing guard...I'd be afraid for the kids.

It is about time someone in the media looked at Palin as what she is.

mark

[Jim__]

11. Does she really think we're at war with Iran?

That scares me more than her inability to speak at an adult level.

[Raschel]

12. My four year old grandaughter speaks better than Palin. And I am not kidding.

[Caliman73]

14. I blame Reagan and Infotainment.

Reagan made it okay to be lazy, greedy, and self satisfied. He began gutting education and other vital development programs. I am sure there were politicians who were relatively dumb in the past, but In speeches, radio, and television from before Reagan, there seemed to be a formality and a sense of intelligence to much of their communication. Now with the media driving the stories in order to make money, they are making heroes out of idiots and we end up with Bush and Palin being taken seriously.

[Initech]

15. Speaks like a toddler and reads notes off her hand. Hmmmmm..,

What is the underlying message the teabaggers are trying to tell me?

[bridgit]

16. Makes sense - when in Rome talk Baby Talk, cause you know she thinks she's cute enough...

to get away with it

[gratuitous]

17. It's verbal word salad

We all remember what happened on those unfortunate occasions in 2008 when an interviewer asked Mrs. Palin to explain some of the substance behind the stream of consciousness. When Mrs. Palin was blathering on about the newspapers she reads, Katie Couric innocently asked her to name a newspaper or two that she reads. Mrs. Palin was absolutely stumped. In her world, it was enough for her to say that she reads the newspapers, and it was gotcha journalism of the basest kind to ask her to name one of those newspapers.

When Charlie Gibson asked a follow-up based on a typical verb scatter, Mrs. Palin looked blank for a fleeting moment, then turned the question on the questioner: “In what respect, Charlie?” Like the veteran pageant contestant she is, Mrs. Palin is primed and programmed to regurgitate a series of sound bites connected ever so loosely with conjunctions and modifiers; substance isn’t required, and thought is antithetical to what she’s “saying.”

It doesn’t stand up to analysis, and when reduced to the stark black-and-white of a transcript, it’s nonsense. But at the moment she says it, it reflects her deepest, most closely-held belief, which lasts precisely as long as the moment it takes her to say it. After that, its shelf life has expired, very much like a toddler or one of the heavier atoms that exists for a picosecond or two under strictly controlled artificial conditions.