"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:
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.
So — here is a transcript of actual college students in California in the 1970s, discussing a scientific issue. They would give the impression, heard live, of perfectly intelligent people; none of us would leave wondering why they weren’t “articulate.”
A. On a tree. Carbon isn’t going to do much for a tree really. Really. The only thing it can do is collect moisture. Which may be good for it. In other words in the desert you have the carbon granules which would absorb, collect moisture on top of them. Yeah. It doesn’t help the tree but it protects, keeps the moisture in. Uh huh. Because then it just soaks up moisture. It works by the water molecules adhere to the carbon moleh, molecules that are in the ashes. It holds it on. And the plant takes it away from there.
B. Oh, I have an argument with you.
A. Yeah.
B. You know, you said how silly it was about my, uh, well, it’s not a theory at all. That the more pregnant you are and you see spots before your eyes it’s proven that it’s the retention of the water.
In this light, we have to remember that we are paying extra special attention to the gulf between Palin’s speech style and the prose of the Economist. Part of why Palin speaks the way she does is that she has grown up squarely within a period of American history when the old-fashioned sense of a speech as a carefully planned recitation, and public pronouncements as performative oratory, has been quite obsolete.
Interesting. What McWhorter was saying is that speech patterns differ greatly from written text, and shouldn't be analyzed as harshly. He also went on to show how things have changed with the passage of time:
Thus after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Congressman Charles Eaton of New Jersey said:
Mr. Speaker, yesterday against the roar of Japanese cannon in Hawaii our American people heard a trumpet call; a call to unity; a call to courage; a call to determination once and for all to wipe off of the earth this accursed monster of tyranny and slavery which is casting its black shadow over the hearts and homes of every land.
He meant this straight. He had it composed the night before and when he stood up to talk, he read, and it was prose that almost sounds like he wanted to set it to music. Sixty-one years later, Senator Sam Brownback gave his thoughts on the wisdom of invading Iraq, and my, how times had changed:
And if we don’t go at Iraq, that our effort in the war on terrorism dwindles down into an intelligence operation. We go at Iraq and it says to countries that support terrorists, there remain six in the world that are as our definition state sponsors of terrorists, you say to those countries: We are serious about terrorism, we’re serious about you not supporting terrorism on your own soil
Not exactly John Stuart Mill. It’s got direct quotation: “You say to those countries, “We are serious about terrorism ...” rather than the more “written” “You say to those countries that we are serious about terrorism ...” This is a spoken language trait, like kids’ “And he’s all ‘Don’t do that!’” using mimcry rather than detached comment. It’s got what linguists call parataxis, where you run phrases together without smoothing out the transitions with conjunctions and such: “We go at Iraq and it says to countries ...” instead of “If we go at Iraq, then it says to countries ...” or the way the “there remain six in the world that are as our definition ....” just jammed in. And never mind “go at” and the fact that “our definition state” rather than “states.”
Brownback was perfectly comprehensible, and intonation does a lot of what indirect quotation and parataxis do on the page.
Notice that McWhorter also suggested that Brownback incorporated a "a spoken language trait, like kids’ 'And he’s all ‘Don’t do that!’” using mimcry rather than detached comment."
For all we know McWhorter believes most politicians talk like children. From what we've seen in the past eighteen months, many of them certainly behave as such.
Yet Palinspeak still differs from statements like Brownback’s in degree. It’s a rather extreme case — an almost instructive distillation of the difference in public conceptions of language in Charles Eaton and Robert Byrd’s time versus our own. “Folksy” is only the beginning of it — “You betcha,” -in for -ing, and “Say it ain’t so, Joe!” during her debate with Joseph Biden indeed make her sound accessible, ordinary, unpretentious. This, however, is America as a whole, and no one should be shocked that a public figure would strike this note. “You betcha” hits the same chord in Palin’s fans as the equally folksy — and close to meaningless -- “Yes, We Can” intoned in a preacherly “black” way did when a certain someone else was saying it. Folksy is America; it always has been, but is especially so now.
And what exactly did McWhorter mean when he said "This reminds me of toddlers who speak from inside their own experience in a related way?" Well, here are the preceding paragraphs for some context:
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.
All of us use there and that in this way in casual speech — it’s a way of placing topics as separate from us on a kind of abstract “desktop” that the conversation encompasses. “The people in accounting down there think they can just ....” But Palin, doing this even when speaking to the whole nation, is no further outside of her head than we are when talking about what’s going on at work over a beer. The issues, American people, you name it, are “there” — in other words, not in her head 24/7. She hasn’t given them much thought before; they are not her. They’re that, over there.
Make a little more sense now?
Here are a couple of more paragraphs she ignored:
I don’t think Palin’s phraseology is actively attractive to her fans. Rather, what is remarkable is that this way of speaking doesn’t prevent someone, today, from public influence. Candidates bite the dust for being untelegenic, dour, philanderers, strident, or looking silly posing in a tank. But having trouble rubbing a noun and a verb together is not considered a mark against one as a figure of political authority. [...]
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
In the end, this was certainly not an article intended to flatter Palin, but it was by no means as demeaning as MacNicol made out.
Maybe we shouldn't expect much from a five-sentence, 100-word analysis of a 2500-word article.
