The Embaracuda Wins the Language Wars - Oh Sarah, Sarah -Your're so Fine

Pseudo hick talk and using affective
Demonstratives as place holers for race
Inventing outsider langugage to be used by insiders
“And I've joined this team
That is a team of mavericks”
Someone is winning the linguistic race
And it's not the poets nor is it  the intellectuals
In spite of the fact that its only the common people
Who really speak in grammatical correct sentances

Traditionally ‘that one’ is used dispargingly
Of women – Clinton’s ‘that woman’ for example
The most memorable line of the night
Belonged to John McCain
"That one," McCain said, pointing at his opponent
With his thumb.

But when it comes to language
It’s not McCain’s (dis)affective demonstrative
But all the Palinisques that give us
Or dear Sarah
Her love of deictic terms
Demonstrative pointing
This, that, these and those
Racking up an impressive 15-to1 advantage
“Taken advantage of again by those managing
Our money and loaning us these dollars”
“Trying to forge that peace, and that needs to be done
And that will be top of an agenda item”
“Americans are craving that straight talk”

It’s McCaine who is learning from Palin
And not the other way around
"Well, it is bull-pucky,
But the splatter pattern is interesting..."

Gov. Palin used 'also' about 5 to 10 times
More often than expected
13 out of her 48 examples
Were sentence-final
And that's what John McCain and I would engage in
             also.
I'm sure that we're going to see more success there,
             also.
Iraq need to be implemented in Afghanistan,
             also.
Her favorite vamping word

Americans have a tradition
E. E. Cummings lamented,
When President Harding died:
“The only man, woman or child who wrote
A simple declarative sentence
With seven grammatical errors is dead.”

Alistair Cooke observed: “Americans seem
To be more comfortable with Republican presidents
Because they share the common frailty
Of muddled syntax and because,
When they attempt eloquence, they do tend to spout
A kind of Frontier Baroque.”

Maureen Dowd: “Darn right. And that, doggone it,
Brings us to a shout-out for the latest virtuoso
Of Frontier Baroque, bless her heart,
The governor of the Last Frontier”

Running against highfalutin
         Eloquence
“Government, you know,
You’re not always a solution.
In fact, too often you’re the problem."

“It is from Alaska that we send those out
To make sure that an eye is being kept
On this very powerful nation, Russia,
Because they are right there.”

She dangles gerunds,
Mangles prepositions,
And randomly exiles nouns
“This is an original voice that doesn’t sound like Washington,
Doesn’t sound like an insider, doesn’t sound at all like
What we have.“I think it sounds outsider.”
Obama is the insider
And McCain holds on for his life

On paper, her sentences would have been
          Difficult to diagram.
“The highest percentage of well-formed sentences
Are found in casual speech
And working-class speakers use more
Well-formed sentences than middle-class speakers.
The widespread myth that most speech
Is ungrammatical is no doubt based upon tapes
Made at learned conferences" - William Labov

Certainly, Ms. Palin, Steven Pinker claimed,
Cranked the folksiness dial to 11
But it would be unfair to question the authenticity
Of her accent or to use it as a measure
Of her intellect or sophistication
And twiddle it she did.
She was one with “everyday American people,
Joe Six-Pack, hockey moms across the nation.”

And that’s the trouble with the Liberals
They don’t sound like pseudo hicks,
Like archetypical people of the sticks
And the Conservatives are the mavericks
Outsiders eternally running against
The establishment they themselves control
And who was it afterall who burnt down
          The Reichstag?
And against a media which slanders them so
And we believe it instinctively, subconsciously
For it’s, you see, in our memes, mythologically
And to say differently is indicative
Of a sore looser

God help us, this is so Orwellian

QUOTE: There are no truths that can be fixed in language. It is by the beak up of the language that the truth can be seen to exist and that it becomes operative again – William Carlos Williams