In Praise of Palin | United States |Axisoflogic.com

Back in the US of A, we are delighted that Sarah Palin has the public’s ear again.

We’re often not sure what she is trying to say. But it doesn’t matter. With Palin, it’s not the thought that counts. It’s the lack of it.

She aims for simplicity, too – a smart move, since there are easily enough simpletons in the U.S. to elect a president, vice president, and an entire Congress.

We always come to the defense of the poor, the despised, and the hopeless halfwits. We’re pretty sure Palin fits in there somewhere. So, today, we come not to laugh at Ms. Palin but to praise her.

We weren’t able to hear Ms. Palin’s endorsement of Donald Trump last week. But we thank Sam Leith, a scholar of rhetoric, for helping us deconstruct it.

The speech was such a wonder of “oratorical eccentricity,” he wrote, “that it seems very likely she wrote it herself.”

Listening to a moron give a political speech is like watching a blind person do home electrical repairs: You know there are going to be some shocking and amusing incidents.

“Trump’s candidacy,” announced Ms. Palin, “it has exposed not just that tragic ramifications of that betrayal of the transformation of our country, but too, he has exposed the complicity on both sides of the aisle that has enable it, okay?”

What does that mean?

We don’t know. But Mr. Leith tells us it was an “anacoluthon,” which he describes as a sentence that “sets off boldly in one direction and, with a wrench of grammar, jumps the tracks and ends up pointing in another.”

We still don’t know what Ms. Palin meant to say. But at least we now know that there is a word for the disease that caused it.

It doesn’t have to mean anything anyway. There are apparently no complex ideas in Ms. Palin’s pensée worthy of careful explication. Instead, her brain simply stews the patriotic patois of the rural rightwing and dishes out the words and phrases primary voters want to hear: “commander-in-chief,” “you betcha,” “families,” “make America great.”

This cafeteria also produces some juicy linguistic innovations.

“Are you ready to stump for Trump?” she asked. We don’t know what that means either.

“Give money to” – as in “plump” – is one possible interpretation. “Stand up for” – as in “mount a stump” – is another possibility. We don’t know.

She also invents a new word: “squirmish.”

Huh?

Don’t overthink it. It works for us as is. We are adding it to our own lexicon, along with her previous neologism “refudiate” and G. W. Bush’s classic “misunderestimate.”

Shakespeare invented dozens of words. Why not Sarah Palin?