Weird assertions about Sarah Palin and language in the news

Yes, it's still happening. People won't stop talking about how Sarah Palin talks. And as far as I can see, they can't stop getting it wrong. This one isn't exactly wrong about how she talks but …

A couple of our contributors apparently watch Chris Matthews on Hardball. Doesn't strike me as healthy, but two of them discovered a little oddity last night in a discussion of Sarah Palin's English. In this video, check out the discussion around 5:00 or so to get the context, with the key part beginning at 5:30:


Alex Wagner says that we should be glad that Palin uses subject-verb agreement. Fair enough. But Chris Matthews responds with this: "Predication, you mean, yeah". 'Predication' has a set of different meanings in linguistics, from pretty non-technical (where a 'predicate' is everything but the subject in a clause) to pretty technical (various syntactic and semantic issues connected with the philosophical sense of 'predication'), some of the latter pretty well explored back in the Government and Binding days (where 'government' had nothing to do with politics). But does anybody know of a usage that would make sense here?

Back in 2008 when Palin's speech — mostly her accent but sometimes her syntax — was all the rage, we blogged that stuff to hell and back. One of the big points was that people were getting it mostly wrong about how she talks. Didn't particulary expect to see it come back around like this. God help us all if she actually acts like she'll run next time around.

Keith numbers

Election fever is once again starting to boil our collective brain in its natural hardshell container. For some of us, that means a chance to watch the media play with poll numbers. Usually it's a lesson in how not to think about math — see the New Hampshire Democratic results versus the press coverage of polls in the week before, for a recent example. Happily, we now have pollster.com, where we have good social scientists (including UW's Political Science prof Charles Franklin) giving lots of poll data with good commentary on what it all does and does not mean.

In the mainstream media, it looks like Keith Olbermann has taken up the battle to raise the standard. He's proposed the "Keith number" as a guide to reading poll numbers:

What, you ask is the ‘Keith number‘? This is the margin of error plus the percentage of undecided …. I thought of it so, I named it after myself. You think of a better caveat for polls from now on and we‘ll name it after you.

Nice basic point, of course, for reckoning what is a real lead versus the illusion of a lead in a poll. And even pollster.com doesn't always make it easy to see the number of undecided.

But what gets me is that there's an established mathematical use of "Keith number", as detailed here and named after Mike Keith. (It's sort of like a Fibonacci sequence.) Is this a clever inside joke by Olbermann or an accident?

Eye dialect trouble

I'm avoiding as much 'year in review' junk as humanly possible this year and looking forward to a less hectic 2008, but I still picked up the local free weekly Isthmus "So long 2007" issue. The little editorial/intro has this headline:

Buh-bye

Don't you hang for a nanosecond there before getting the right reading, namely (I hope) [bəbai]? This pronunciation seems to be associated with flight attendants, especially (from a SNL skit?). I was surprised to see Urban Dictionary with this definition:

normally used as a dismissive for a person's comments or an idea that is unwelcome or unpleasant. sometimes used after a look of disbelief.

It's not faring well — it's drawing mostly thumbs down on the reactions deal that UD has. But maybe this is how it's being used here?

Speaking of end of the year stuff, The Onion had the best ever title for a year in review issue: 2007. What the hell just happened? On a related, and more forwardlooking philosophical note, here's the Onion's Libra horoscope this week:

Your belief that God does not play dice with the universe will be tested by the discovery of a 10,000-mile-long craps table on Jupiter.

Happy new year, everybody.