Quote of the Day: John McWhorter on Sarah Palin (and her all-American toddler-speak)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

This, it seems to me, is spot on:

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).

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What truly distinguishes Palin's speech is its utter subjectivity: that is, she speaks very much from the inside of her head, as someone watching the issues from a considerable distance. The there fetish, for instance -- Palin frequently displaces statements with an appended "there," as in "We realize that more and more Americans are starting to see the light there..." But where? Why the distancing gesture? At another time, she referred to Condoleezza Rice trying to "forge that peace." That peace? You mean that peace way over there -- as opposed to the peace that you as Vice-President would have been responsible for forging? She's far, far away from that peace.

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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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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.

Ouch. It doesn't exactly say much for American culture -- and the American people -- that it's essentially personified, linguistically, by Sarah Palin.

But something has to explain her ongoing popularity, at least on the right -- which, let's face it, is child-like (and not in a good way, and I don't mean to insult children) -- and this at least partly does.

She's one of you, my American friends. Like it or not.