Sarah Palin’s ungrammatical grammar

February 4, 2016 • 2:30 pm

If you want to see a tongue-in-cheek but also serious analysis of Sarah Palin’s public speeches mind dumps, have a look at Tuesday’s New York Times article “Sarah Palin’s English” by Anna North.  We’ve all heard Palin babble on many times, but when her words are put into print, they look even dumber. But North, a staff editor for Op-Talk, takes the grammar seriously, explaining what Palin is trying to do, although in the last line of the piece (not reproduced here) she gives away the game.

A few excerpts:

Mrs. Palin is also a big fan of the participial phrase. “And that blank check too,” she said on Monday, “making no sense because it’s led us to things, oh gosh, to pay the bills then, we have had to uh, print money out of thin air.”

In this case “making no sense” and everything that follows appear to modify “blank check”; though it can be a little hard to tell with Mrs. Palin, the participial phrase seems to function as an adjective. Elsewhere in her speech Mrs. Palin got more sophisticated.

“Politics being kind of brutal business,” she said, “you find out who your friends are, that’s for sure.”

Here, “politics being kind of brutal business” defines the circumstances under which the action occurs. It looks like a construction that will be familiar to anybody who took Latin in school: the ablative absolute.

An ablative absolute in Latin is a particular kind of clause that, according to one definition, “modifies the whole sentence as an adverb modifies the action of a verb.” An example, courtesy of The Latin Library: “His verbis dictis, Caesar discedit.” Translation: “With these words having been said, Caesar departs.”

In fact, a lot of what Sarah Palin says sounds like it’s been poorly translated from the Latin. With her “he who” and “one who,” she’d sound almost Ciceronian if it weren’t for the holes in her logic and the way those complicated sentences sometimes dribble off into vaguely sinister, possibly offensive nonsense.

One more bit:

. . . Here’s Mrs. Palin using both a dependent clause and a participial phrase to attack President Obama on Jan. 19:

And he, who would negotiate deals, kind of with the skills of a community organizer maybe organizing a neighborhood tea, well, he deciding that, “No, America would apologize as part of the deal,” as the enemy sends a message to the rest of the world that they capture and we kowtow, and we apologize, and then, we bend over and say, “Thank you, enemy.”

I honestly am not sure what’s going on in this sentence.

You’ll have to go to the piece to see North’s peroration.

63 thoughts on “Sarah Palin’s ungrammatical grammar”

  2. Pinker says linguistics can be a window to understanding the brain. I’d suggest that how well one manages to express oneself is a good first approximation as to how perceptive and coherent their thought is in general.

      1. In his last show he featured the quack doctor who cured Charlie Sheen of his HIV infection, I thought to make fun of him (?). No,it was to laud him 🙁

        Such a complex human being – at once funny and smart and stupid.

  4. After experiencing Sarah Palin’s ablative absolutie, I absolutely need a cardiac ablation.

    (For explanation, “http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/guide/what-is-cardiac-ablation”)

  6. from the comments section 🙂

    “The diagram of any of her blathering sentences would make Escher bite his fist with envy.”

  7. See, this is what makes being a composition teacher so difficult:

    You got prissy Anna North types playing the “I spanky your bare ass for not SPEAKING the Good English!”

    So how is anyone supposed to feel comfortable writing with Aunty Agony breathing down their necks while Airhead Palin whispers in their ear?

    Handcuff Anna to Sarah and kick Sarah offen a cliff.

    1. I don’t read Anna North regularly, but I didn’t sense anything overly censorious in this column of hers. Rather than a prissy bottom-spanking, it seems a good-faith (if tongue-in-cheek) effort to unpack Palin’s speech. If anything, North takes Sister Sarah’s fractured syntax and sentence construction more seriously than they merit.

  8. In most people I assume that kind of language-logic is a sign of English being a second or third language for them. For Palin I just figured it was a sign of disorganized, sometimes incoherent thought. I’m pretty good at making some accidental word salads myself, but I’m just an amateur compared to the ten star work salad chef that is Palin.

    1. Maybe … if King James’s committeemen had climbed the Tower of Babel and come down unable to communicate with one another.

  11. Makes one wonder if she ever writes anything down – maybe see what it looks like first.

    News events pop into her head, randomly of course, and then she spits out clauses about this event. The last one was obviously about the recent Iran incident, where the Navy boats were stopped and captured after going off course. The service men were released the following day and the state department apologized. I believe Cruz also jumped on this and said something dramatic like – He would never allow this and would bring the full force of the U.S. military down on them.

    Very impressive stuff but only if you are an idiot.

  12. Her recent resurrection into the mainstream is like a gift from heaven to the late night talk show hosts and comedians. Not that they were lacking in political material to joke about lately.

  14. These words having been said by, with or from Citizen North, I sing of Sara Iulia Palina, the Republicans having been overturned, a Governor with a great future behind her. (With apologies to Tacitus, Virgil and my lovely old Latin teacher, Mr. Crosthwaite.) x

      1. Mayamarkov,

        His verbis dictis a cive Aquilone, cano Sarae Iuliae Palinae, res publicae eversae, omnium consensu capax gubernatori, nisi gubernasset.

        Erm…I think. Augustus reigned slightly longer than the last time I studied Latin. My Latin’s more ruined than rusty. x

          1. Btw, Mayamarkov, all I did in one piece of the translation was to rip off Tacitus’ famous description of Emperor Galba who reigned for a few months: ‘omnium consensu capax imperii, nisi imperasset’. Almost literally, ‘by the consent of all capable of being emperor, unless he had been emperor’. Whoever translated that as ‘an Emperor with a great future behind him’ had a real sly wit. As had the cynical Tacitus: who always wrote, if things got politically tendentious, with an ambiguous pen of credible deniability.

            Tacitus’ ‘Histories’ starts with the standard and apparently unoriginal line about the year 69 being Galba’s second consulship: the author was artfully making the point that Galba, whose first consulship was a generation earlier in 33CE, was yesterday’s man. An old, ineffectual man with a great future behind him.

            Tacitus is commonly placed in the silver, as opposed to the golden, period of Roman literature of a century before, exemplified by Virgil, Horace and Livy. How lucky we are, given his apologies for one section of the Roman senatorial class over another, that we still have some of his dense, difficult and illuminating writings: which have only come down to us via the Christian west in 1 or 2 manuscripts. x

  15. I would like to see a sample of her writing that hasn’t been edited. I’ve known people who could write quite clearly, but even if they’re reading what they just wrote, it would be a jumbled mess when spoken. My guess is that she has a learning disability, something akin to dyslexia. The problem with her is, once you get the gist of what she’s trying to say, you realize that she’s also dumb as a rock.

    1. Disabilities and stupid. Who says John McCain doesn’t know VP material when he sees it.

      1. That’s one thing about being a Republican, you have to go after the stupid vote…since it’s more than 75% of your base.

      3. Up until McCain partnered with Palin I still had some tiny bit of respect for him that he had not yet stomped out of me. Not for lack of trying. But taking on Palin as his VP running mate removed all my doubts about McCain.

      1. Further, I think it goes the other way. Spoken verbiage can make sense when a strict transcript would not because of things like inflection, gestures, other body language, other delivery details like pauses, etc.

        1. Ah, you’re making a distinction between the way she speaks and the way she might write. I could be wrong, but does she not read these speeches from something written down?

          1. I think her handlers would like her to stay on script, but she starts winging it and the end result is what we would refer to as “gibberish”. I know someone who has a similar problem, which when they try to read a speech, it results in fragmented sentences interspersed with non-sequential thoughts. It’s difficult to listen to. I’ve always thought this person has ADD and maybe Palin does too. Something is going on in that tiny brain of hers.

          3. The left is a brain with lesions after strokes, the right is the brain activation of a healthy writer, by the way.

    3. I was once discussing Palin with a friend and first started to explain who she is, because she is poorly known in the uncivilized corner of the world where I live. My friend remarked, “Oh I know her! She wears glasses to look intelligent!”

      1. If the Palins are any indication, the “uncivilized corner of the world” has it’s hub in Wasilla, Alaska. 🙂

    4. Your last phrase just caught me off guard and cracked me up.

      ‘Dumb as a rock’ indeed.

      🙂

      cr

  16. It never occurred to me that she might have speechwriters. If she does, they’re probably stoners whose button down shirts, khakis, and rich Republican parents belie their true selves.

  17. I’d like to see a cross between her speech and Deepities. I think we would finally reach the “singularity of meaninglessness”.

  18. I’ll be brief and simply point out that many — perhaps most — people look foolish when their speech is transcribed.

    And, no: this is not a defence of Sarah Palin, just of good linguistics. 😉

      1. Sorry, should have been clearer: I meant to reference spontaneous speech, generally. It tends to be filled with lots of “ums” and “uhs”, false starts, sentence fragments, et cetera. It can seem downright incoherent!

  20. It’s a liberal conspiracy. Trump and Palin are working for the Democrats. I’m joking of course, but why is it so hard to tell if they are really serious? Trump dropping out of the debate looks so much like he was finally ready to start losing and pull out, mission accomplished. Along the way he said some of the stupidest most divisive shit, as if to test new limits on what can get you kicked out of American politics. It only took him higher, there are no limits.

    Idiocracy has arrived.

    1. sorry for repeating, the first one disappeared so I thought I had forgotten to hit the post button. Mea culpa.

  25. Hilarious! The analysis is simply hilarious.
    I am from Germany, perhaps I should give Ms. Palin some English lessons? 😆

  27. I’ve been reading readers’ comments on other threads (a few of the comments being unwieldy), and just now it came to mind what Palin’s problem is…..

    She has a predilection for prefacing, but can process only so much in her brain at any given time, so much so that she gets lost in a maze of her own creation.

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