If I remember anything from the 2008 Presidential Campaign, it is Sarah Palin answering questions. She was easy to fear, but hard to hate. She always seemed to me like a small animal in the middle of the road not sure where to run to escape a fast-approaching car. Much later, when she spoke more coherently, I found that she was, in fact, easy to hate: she was filled with the same right-wing hate-mongering that we’ve come to expect from the once Grand Ol’ Party. I miss those early days. And I’ve coined a term to celebrate them.

Katie Couric

Palin’s most famous “answer,” of course, was her answer to Katie Couric’s question about what Supreme Court decisions she was against. Palin provided the following answer initially, “There’s of course in the great history of America there have been rulings that there’s never going to be absolute consensus by every American. And there are those issues again like Roe v. Wade where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there so you know going through the history of America there would be others.”

Based upon this one interview, I conclude that Couric is a nice woman. She wasn’t trying to “get” Palin. After this answer, Couric follows up with, “Can you think of any?” She says this in the soft, encouraging voice of a good grammar school teacher. A smart, but ignorant person would say, “My mind’s gone blank with all the lights and pressure of the campaign; let me get back to you on that.” Palin says, “I would think of any again that could best be dealt with on a more local level maybe I would take issue with. But as a mayor and as a governor and even as a vice-president if I’m so privileged to serve. Wouldn’t be in a position of changing those things but supporting the law of the land as it reads today.”

There are some interesting things to note about this exchange. There’s the fact that Palin almost never uses the word “um.” I think this is because she doesn’t need to. When most people talk, they need to pause occasionally to collect thoughts. Palin doesn’t need this time because she is not collecting thoughts; she’s just spitting out words and phrases in the hope that it will make sense. It is the equivalent of a bimbo’s giggle or a redneck’s “ah, shucks!” And that’s just fine if all you want to do is hang out with the girls or throw back a few with the boys.

Also interesting is the fact that Palin correctly states that the VP doesn’t really have anything to do with the Supreme Court. When she first met with the McCain people, she asked what the VP did. So this phrase is probably something they had been pounding into her brain. And it came out at Katie Couric!

If you look at just her first sentence you will see what she has going on, “There’s of course in the great history of America there have been rulings that there’s never going to be absolute consensus by every American.” (Remind anyone of Mars Attacks!?) This would be somewhat coherent if the question had been, “What do you think of the conflict between majority rule and Constitutional protections?” However, even if that were the questions (and it wasn’t—not even close), it would still just be a jumble of words.

The Palindrone

This is why I have coined a term: Palindrone. Or, if you prefer: Palin-drone. As all nerds know, a palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same forwards and backwards. A Palindrone, however, is a collection of words and phrases combined randomly and signifying nothing, which, if combined in any other order, would still signify nothing. It is pronounced just as you would the two words: Sarah’s last name and “drone.” The accent is on the first syllable.

You might think this is a fairly limited word, but it isn’t. It is very common in politics. Most politicians do not have Palin’s ability to keep a Palindrone going for several minutes, but they can easily do it for a sentence or a whole “paragraph.” If you doubt me about Palin’s ability, see the 2008 VP Debate.

Palin Is Everywhere

Shortly before the 2008 election, Las Vegas held a “Sarah Palin look-alike stripper contest.” Here is a picture of the event from the Daily Telegraph:

What is most interesting about this photo is that when I saw it, I thought it was Sarah Palin. The fact that I had no trouble believing that Palin would be dressed like that during her beauty-pageant days says more about me than it does her. But it does say a lot about her. It is sad, but those five women are probably more serious thinkers than Palin. They just don’t get booked on Faux News.

Update

Although I coined this term, I knew that many other must have thought of it before I did. The Urban Dictionary currently has 19 definitions of the word. They roughly fall into two categories: meaningless speech and Palin follower. Most of the meaningless speech definitions focus on the backward-forward aspect of the pun. This is fine, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense. There is no reason that one would parse a sentence backwards. This is a reason to start moving the words around because such sentences sound like they mean something. Almost all of the definitions are from right before the election two years ago. As usual, I’m right on top of things.

Earlier this evening, I sent out some email that contained the following sentence, “Paul Krugman wrote a column that I think is really insightful and enunciates a lot of the frustration that I feel about the Obama administration.” But before I did, I spent a half-hour fretting over whether to use the word “annunciate” rather than “enunciate.” Other people spend their evenings watching TV or visiting with friends. These options are not available to me, having neither TV nor friends close by. So I get enunciate and annunciate.

Normally, such a question would be easy to settle. A hare has hair and not the other way around. But the definitions of “enunciate” and “annunciate” are frustratingly similar. What’s more, reference to Fowler and other usage guides were, in this case, useless—I dare say because “annunciate” is effectively obsolete and literally archaic.

I will get to the differences between these words, but I would like to point out that the Internet—as I find increasingly—provided at best flawed and at worst simply wrong information on the subject. One Step Forward provides a nice overview of the two words—including the etymology of the words, only half of which I could corroborate, but provides a highly misleading definition of “enunciate.” Much worse, Mighty Red Pen rightly blasts a Huffington Post column about Perez Hilton for using “annunciating” where “enunciating” is required, only to provide a ridiculously limiting definition of the latter.

Everyone seems to understand that “annunciate” means “announce.” Thus, it is wrong to say that Perez Hilton over-annunciates. (Although it might be all right to say that Thomas Paine over-annunciated Common Sense. Maybe.) The problem is “enunciate.” Again, everyone seems to understand it as an intransitive verb: to utter articulate sounds. We run into trouble when we deal with it as a transitive verb: to make a definite or systematic statement of. This definition is, in most cases, identical to “annunciate.”

In addition to these problems, the two words have pronunciation issues. “Annunciate” is pronounced with a soft-E, “enunciate” hard. In my experience, “enunciate” is pronounced with a soft-I. This places it right in between the sounds of these two easily confused words.

I think we should jettison “annunciate.” It has many problems:

1. It is almost never used.
2. It means exactly the same thing as “announce.”
3. Its meaning is roughly the same as “enunciate” when used the same way.
4. Enunciate and it are too easily mixed up in spoken English.

Regardless of what the rest of the foolish world does, I plan never to use “annunciate” again.

I am in the middle of reading E. T. Bell’s Men of Mathematics. It was written in 1937, but frankly, it could have been written in 1887. The thinking and style are so Victorian. I’m sure I will have more to say about Bell’s thinking at a later time—for now, take my word he has a simplistic, highly romantic view of people and history. (In its way, it is charming.) Today, I would like to talk just a little about the writing style.

Here is an example of Bell’s style taken almost at random:

Yes, this in itself is not horrific, but I challenge you to put up with hundreds of pages of it. This is why I was pushed to check the book’s copyright. When I bought it, I thought it was recent—in the last few decades. After reading some of it, I started to get that P. A. Motteux feeling. But both thoughts were wrong; it was written well into the Modern period when so much great—and above all, crisp—writing had been done. Ten years before Bell wrote the above quotation, Gertrude Stein wrote this for Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts:

Or I could have quoted something from The Sun Also Rises—but that’s not nearly as fun.

The point of all this is that Bell was not a writer; he was a mathematician. Had he written fifty years later, Stein would doubtless have had an effect on him—even (or perhaps especially) if he had never read her. It takes such a long time for the cutting edge to become “less work around the house!” I know Bell understood that about math. I can’t say whether he understood that about writing. But it doesn’t matter; such knowledge would not have changed how he wrote.