Diagramming Sarah Palin’s words

One of the things many pundits noted about Gov. Sarah Palin’s performance in last night’s debate was her much-improved speaking ability.

As the Minneapolis Star Tribune observed this morning, “The McCain campaign needed Palin to come out and speak in complete sentences. She did.”

On Slate, Fred Kaplan wrote “So Gov. Sarah Palin can speak spontaneously in complete and coherent sentences…”

“Ms. Palin surpassed expectations not just by knowing enough facts and placing them into cogent sentences…,” opined the Dallas Morning News.

The Chicago Tribune’s critic said “Palin spoke her declarative sentences, declarative sentences delivered without necessary regard to any question, with passion, striking speed and an upbeat folksy charm.”

“Was this woman capable of completing an extemporaneous paragraph — a collection of sentences with subjects, verbs, objects and, if possible, an actual meaning?” wrote the conservative David Brooks in the New York Times. (Yes was his answer, by the way.)

But not everyone was so impressed. Writing for the New York Times this afternoon, David Blow (the Times’ visual op-ed columnist) asks “Palinese? Sarah-phonics? What Is This?”

“I hate to come back to this, but what language is Sarah Palin speaking? Is she using some kind of Yoda-like syntax that I don’t understand? Someone please tell me because it is about to make me grind my teeth down to the gum line.”

And he goes on to pull some video and a number of quotes from the debate transcript that don’t hold up well to examination. But the same point was made in a far, far more amusing way by Kitty Burns Foley on Slate. (Foley is the author of Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog, a book about diagramming sentences. No, really.)

As Foley says:

There are plenty of people out there—not only English teachers but also amateur language buffs like me — who believe that diagramming a sentence provides insight into the mind of its perpetrator. 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.

Oh, but there’s more:

Once we start diagramming political sentences, the diagram’s indifference to meaning can be especially striking. Stirring words like “I have a dream,” the magisterial Declaration of Independence (a staple of diagramming teachers), bald-faced lies (”I am not a crook”), and crafty shadings of the truth (”I did not have sexual relations with that woman”) can be diagrammed with equal ease. But some politicians — our current president included — offer meanderings in the higher realms of drivel that leave the diagrammer groping for the Tylenol (”Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream”) or the gin bottle (”I remember meeting a mother of a child who was abducted by the North Koreans right here in the Oval Office”).

So, Foley tackled a few of Palin’s recent quotes. There’s a good one below. Read more here.