Sarah Palin Diagrammed (The Angry Grammarian by Jeffery Barg))

[struggle4progress]

I hate sentence diagramming ... But sometimes it’s necessary. Like when Sarah Palin is talking ...

Or how about this nugget: “John McCain’s maverick position that he’s in, that’s really prompt up to and indicated by the supporters that he has.”

First, minus five points for overuse of the word “maverick.” Take out the unnecessary appositives and the sentence starts, “John McCain’s maverick position is really prompt” — grammatically diagrammable, but completely nonsensical. “Up to and indicated by the supporters”—connected to what? Is “up” an adverb, a preposition or a placeholder while she figures out what the hell to say?

http://www.thesteamboatlocal.net/article.php?id=764

Is our children learning?

[quiet.american]

1. Love the logo at that site. Good stuff. nt

[Miss Authoritiva]

2. Nonsensical (grammatically and otherwise)

Gibberish is gibberish. The first person in the Bush Administration whose Q&A responses I started to diagram was Rumsfeld. During the first two years of the Iraq War, I would print out transcripts of Rumsfeld's press conferences and sharpen my red pencil. The man was a mad hatter. Then I started on Rice's testimony to Congress. Unlike Rumsfeld's responses, which were the joint result of early-onset senility and too many years of pitching corporate-speak, Rice's responses were meant to obfuscate and just generally run out the clock. She was brilliant at it -- in an unspeakably evil way.

[RaleighNCDUer]

3. The hell of it is, those of her base don't hear that as being any

different than people speaking gramatically - they don't really understand Obama when he speaks, so if they can't make sense of what Palin is saying it makes no impact on them. They listen for key words and phrases, not content.

They don't know nonsense when they hear it, because it is ALL nonsense to them.

[Peggesis1]

4. Gee, NCevilDUer, I think you're on to something...

This is something that would be interesting to test. If there are students looking for a project on basic linguistic competence in listening/comprehension English skills, this would be a wonderfully useful thing to explore. The problem of poor literacy skills in American adults has been studied. How much work on listening competence has been done?

[madmom]

5. stop being such an elitist!