Dick Cavett searches out Sarah’s syntax

Dick Cavett quotes a Sarah Palin sentence: “My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars…”

Yes, the quote is a concoction of non-thought, mis-fired synapses or a way of speaking she’d need to use in Washington. Mr Cavett is much relieved the better syntax using, the better synaptic firing Mr Obama is in office, or about to be in office. Unfortunately what he fails to note is that though The One’s sentence structure is better, it is to a large extent void of substance.

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Update 1:

More about syntax (Sarah and Joe the Plumber in book form–sort of like sin text).

Update 2:

Camille Paglia searches out Dick Cavett’s syntax.

Cavett’s piece on Sarah Palin was insufferably supercilious. With dripping disdain, he sniffed at her “frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences.” He called her “the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High,” “one who seems to have no first language.” I will pass over Cavett’s sniggering dismissal of “soccer moms” as lightweights who should stay far, far away from government. I was so outraged when I read Cavett’s column that I felt like taking to the air like a Valkyrie and dropping on him at his ocean retreat in Montauk in the chichi Hamptons. How can it be that so many highly educated Americans have so little historical and cultural consciousness that they identify their own native patois as an eternal mark of intelligence, talent and political aptitude? In sonorous real life, Cavett’s slow, measured, self-interrupting and clause-ridden syntax is 50 years out of date. Guess what: There has been a revolution in English — registered in the 1950s in the street slang, colloquial locutions and assertive rhythms of both Beat poetry and rock ‘n’ roll and now spread far and wide on the Web in the standard jazziness of blogspeak. Does Cavett really mean to offer himself as a linguistic gatekeeper for political achievers in this country?

“The Patronizing factor”

In my humble opinion Englishman turned American, scotch drinker, part time socialist and god debunker (among other things) Christopher Hitchens certainly qualifies as the new H. L. Mencken. Along with his books (God is Not Great, The Missionary Position, A Long Short War) you may want to read his columns at Slate. The excerpt from below concerns the partonizing of Sarah Palin. The reference to the “most dysfunctional family” stems from what Hitchens wrote about the Clintons in No One Left to Lie: The Values of the Worst Family.

I could well be wrong, but I think something similar is involved in the attempt to paint the Palin family as if it were Arkansas on ice or Tobacco Road with igloos and Inuit. Very well, she possibly has had her Troopergate and even trailer-park moments. But whom exactly did the Democrats drown in moist applause, for two nights running, in Denver? The most dysfunctional family ever to occupy not the vice-presidential mansion but the executive one. It’s hard to imagine that there will be any more unwanted pregnancies or shotgun weddings when or if the Palins move to the Naval Observatory on Massachusetts Avenue, whereas with the Clintons, the very thing that made all Bill’s friends turn white and pee green was that they made him the president, and he still wouldn’t stop. For me, it is astonishing that the Democrats have been babbling all week as if this point isn’t just waiting—indeed begging—to be made in riposte to their “opposition research.”