The pickings are apparently so slim in the linguistics field that three University of Wisconsin-Madison linguists took on the conundrum of Sarah Palin's speech patterns. That's how it was reported, a conundrum, suggesting that they went off in search of a solution to a problem that didn't exist.We wonder if the scholars who researched Sarah Palin's speech patterns were financed by a federal grant...
[...]
It turns out that Palin speaks the way she does because farmers from Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota moved to Alaska's Matanuska and Susitna valleys in the 1930s. Those farmers and their descendants settled Wasilla, Palin's hometown. I guess that's what passes for scholarly research in the linguistics field.
[...]
The professors said that such informal speech is jarring to listeners attuned to hearing formal political talk and led many to question whether Palin was speaking that way for effect.
In other words, and without mention of Joe Biden's curious hybrid version of the English language, Palin was obviously a bumpkin incapable of the kind of formal grammar that we come to expect from our politicians.
These clowns couldn't be any more transparent. They might run a study on how often Barack Obama drops the "-ing" from words. Obama changes speech patterns depending on the crowd.
[...]
All politicians cannot resist the disingenuous and patronizing dropping of the "-ing" because they think it makes them sound like they just came from Home Depot, where they bought plywood and chewed the fat with people in the checkout line.
The only difference between Palin and the rest of them is that she has probably been to a Home Depot.
- JP
