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.

Abhorrentible Blasphemecration!

If you're able to stop crying about the substance behind this This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow, check out the pseudo-Palinisms in panel 3. (Click to embiggen.)

Nuff said.

Palin and Wisconsin ... yet more!

Slate did a Write-like-Sarah-Palin contest and the winner is … a woman from Wisconsin. She hasn't even read Going Rogue (probably not Going Rouge either), it seems.

And you doubted that there was a really fundamental connection between Palin and the Upper Midwestern?

Vocabulary hoax humor, best ever?

Wonkette continues its hilarious and über-snarky Palin coverage, with a current focus on Levi Johnston posing for Playgirl magazine. (Am I the only one who thought that died in the 1970s or something?)

As discussed here long ago, Wonkette has a riff about the whole Palin crew as "snowbillies". Playing on that, a commenter, pampl, has posted this comment:

The Wasillan language has over a dozen words for meth-dealing pseudo-in-laws.

The story is here, but I caution you that if you click there, you'll see more of Levi than you ever wanted to. (Seems like a safe assumption, but maybe I'm wrong.)

Image from here.

Palinorama

I guess nobody's noticing like the folks in Alaska, but the release of Going Rogue is generating another huge wave of attention to Sarah Palin. This piece from the Fairbanks Daily News gives a good survey. And this is probably the last blast for the Wisconsin team that wrote about her accent (see here). "Defining dialect, perceiving dialect and new dialect formation: Sarah Palin’s speech" by Tom Purnell and colleagues is now available from the Journal of English Linguistics website.

Maybe now we can really move on.

Update, 7:30, by Joe: We can't move on quite yet!  It turns out the Tina Fey did pick up on the feel/fill merger. I just got email from an alert reader in Canada with this link to a video from immediately before the election, where she clearly pronounces deal with a lax vowel, sounding like dill.

I've also added an image (from here) to underscore just how far from over this deal (or dill) could be.

OK, Sarah Palin's accent ... update

I didn't want to return to the topic. But I'm weak …

Trueslant gives "100 reasons we'll miss Sarah Palin". You don't have to read far to get to this:

6. She uses a fake accent? You Betcha!

• Chicago Tribune: Sarah Palin’s accent explained

And it goes on from there:

12. Tina Fey doesn’t want to play Sarah Palin anymore.

• Huffington Post: Tina Fey On Sarah Palin: “If She Wins…I’m Leaving Earth”

13. She injured the St. Louis Blues goalie, and cursed the team as they lost 8 of 10 games after her appearance.

• CBC: Hip flexor forces Legace from Blues game

15. Doesn’t pronounce the G’s at the end of her words.

• UPenn Language Log: Palin’s tactical g-lessness

OK, not all are language-related, but, hey, we are in Wisconsin.

Tina Fey on Sarah Palin's crazy voice

This was over on ADS-L, in case you missed it:



Rumor has it that a very good sociolinguist/dialectologist is working on a paper about Fey's Palin. And I've mentioned that our Wisconsin Englishes guys have an article coming soon on Palin's speech. Stay tuned.

Hockey chants: Metrics and politics

The University of Wisconsin has a "raucous, jeering, taunting student section" at home hockey games, as it was put here by the Anchorage Daily News. Last night, the University of Alaska – Anchorage Seawolves skated against the Badgers in the Kohl Center. The Badgers took a 3-0 lead and won 3-2. It was a 'physical game', as the euphemism goes, with two key Badgers injuries, one that looked bad.

I've noted the creativity of the student section before, chanting 'racist mascot!' when the University of North Dakota Fighting Sioux come, and 'cite your sources!' when an opposing goalie had been kicked out of an earlier scholarship for plagiarism. These exemplify the metrical patterns that's clearly preferred:

x . x .

That is, two trochees – four syllables strong/weak, strong/weak. I knew that we'd hear "Whát's a Séawolf?", and was hoping that we'd get some Sarah Palin chants. Certainly she made an impression on folks who follow the Western Collegiate Hockey Association (which Wisconsin and Anchorage belong to).

Sure enough, when a Seawolf was ejected for a play that left Blake Geoffrion — yes, he's the son of Bernie 'Boom Boom' Geoffrion — writhing on the ice, the students just pointed at the Seawolf and chanted "Sárah Pálin", maybe calling him a loser. Shortly thereafter, they started a call and response:

Call: Sarah Palin. Response: Sucks.

Then:

I see Russia!

And finally:

Russian rejects!

The missus was hoping for this one:

You're no maverick!

Sarah Salad

Someone said Sarah Palin truly speaks in word salad. I don't think so... I think it's phrase salad. We were talking about this and Mr. Verb asked whether she has recursion. It's a good (and timely) question!

Palin does 'urban dialect'?

Time is running out on the Palin Clock here, so let's play it for what it's worth. Dana Milbank writes this on his WaPo blog:

The Diva proceeded to list some people whose money the Democrats would take away along with Joe the Plumber's: "Doug the Barber and Christine the Florist, and Cindy the Citizen. We've got Joe the Plumber's Son, Jack the Hunter, Vickie the Realtor. One of my favorites last night, it was 'I am Joe Mama.' " The crowd delighted in the way the former Miss Wasilla said "Joe Mama" in urban dialect. For the record, a search of the White House speech archive indicates that neither President Bush nor Vice President Cheney has used the phrase "Joe Mama" over the past eight years. It was more evidence that Palin will, for better or worse, make good on her promise to bring change to Washington.

"Urban dialect" has to be an awkward reference to African-American speech – out of character for Milbank, I think. But wasn't that turn of phrase stale 20 years ago? It was used on South Park, oh, forever ago. Or longer. Just google it and see how widespread and how post-urban (?) it is.

Image from Cafe Press.

Palin's voice coach

Well, the big linguablogging Palin update is clearly Bill Poser's Log post on moose, source of her favorite burgers. But since nobody else has mentioned it that I know of, here's a fresh language angle, from the Sunday NYT magazine piece on McCain, starting after Palin's speech at the GOP convention:

While all of this was going on, an elegant middle-aged woman sat alone at the far end of the bar. She wore beige slacks and a red sweater, and she picked at a salad while talking incessantly on her cellphone. But for the McCain/Palin button affixed to her collar and the brief moment that Tucker Eskew, Palin’s new counselor, spoke into her ear, she seemed acutely disconnected from the jubilation swelling around her.

In fact, the woman was here for a reason. Her name was Priscilla Shanks, a New York-based stage and screen actress of middling success who had found a lucrative second career as a voice coach. Shanks’s work with Sarah Palin was as evident as it was unseen. Gone, by the evening of her convention speech, was the squeaky register of Palin’s exclamations. Gone (at least for the moment) was the Bushian pronunciation of “nuclear” as “nook-you-ler.” Present for the first time was a leisurely, even playful cadence that signaled Sarah Palin’s inevitability on this grand stage.

Interesting little tidbit, whatever conclusions one can really draw from her having had a voice coach. Also see this post.

Verbing, Palin edition

Go to palined.com to see the campaign to make Sarah Palin's last name a verb. Here's the proposed definition:

1. To flub, fail or otherwise stumble in response to simple, predictable questions in an interview; to give an off-topic and incoherent or syntactically suspect response to a simple, predictable question in an interview; to do likewise in any other human endeavor. 2. To fabricate an untruth, that is easily verifiable as such, in response to a question for which one does not know the answer.

'Suspect syntax' aside, I might have imagined a more general meaning, like 'to fail in the most public and spectacular way conceivable', but that chapter probably hasn't been written yet. Maybe that's going to be 3.?

Palin and language ...

Haven't even kept up on news today (but thank you, Ben Zimmer), let alone been able to blog about it. I'll catch up soon, but note this. It's about diagramming Sarah Palin's sentences (see image). Check out this morsel:

The more the diagram is forced to wander around the page, loop back on itself, and generally stretch its capabilities, the more it reveals that the mind that created the sentence is either a richly educated one—with a Proustian grasp of language that pushes the limits of expression—or such an impoverished one that it can produce only hot air, baloney, and twaddle.

Whoa. I know a lot of syntax folks, but never heard one talk like that before.

Palin nickname poll results

Caribou Barbie wins with a plurality of the vote. Failin and June Cleavage trailed well behind. I don't think anybody noted this moniker:

Palinocchio

Of course there's a lot more out there now on her speech, including over at the Log. One new feature jumped out at me yesterday, in this quip about looking forward to debating Biden:

I’ve been hearing about his Senate speeches since I was like in the second grade.

Somehow I didn't expect this kind of like from her. Its use by older national politicians is well documented. Was this a way of emphasizing her youth in contrast to Old Joe Biden? Or maybe the joke (?) that she was hearing about senate speeches in second grade is what's really jarring.