The sentences of Sarah Palin, diagrammed
There are plenty of people out there—not only English teachers but also amateur language...who believe that diagramming a sentence provides insight into the mind of its perpetrator.
Fascinating.
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.
Any guesses on the outcome of diagramming Palin's sentences?
The sentences she uttered in interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and Katie Couric seem to Twitter all over the place like mourning doves frightened at the feeder. Which left me wondering: What can we learn from diagramming them? One thing we can't learn, of course, is whether her words are true or make sense. Part of the appeal of diagramming is the fact that just about any sentence can be diagrammed, even when it is gibberish.
So let's take a crack at a few of Palin's doozies. From the Katie Couric interview:
"It's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where—where do they go?"
LOL. Look at the diagram of that sentence.
Other Palinisms are not so tractable. From the Charlie Gibson interview:
"I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people."
I had to give up. This sentence is not for diagramming lightweights. If there's anyone out there who can kick this sucker into line, I'd be delighted to hear from you. To me, it's not English—it's a collection of words strung together to elicit a reaction, floating ands and prepositional phrases ("with that vote of the American people") be damned. It requires not a diagram but a selection of push-buttons.
It's not English.
Granted, diagramming usually deals with written English.
Ha!
In our world, politicians don't do much writing: Their preferred communication is the canned speech. But they're also forced, from time to time, to answer questions, and their answers often resemble the rambling nonsense, obfuscation, and grammatical insanity that many of us would produce when put on the spot... Do we really want to be led by someone who, when asked a straightforward question, flails around like an undergraduate who stayed up all night boozing instead of studying for the exam?
The republican presidential nominee's desire to put an unqualified, religious bumpkin into the second most important political office in the country seems to indicate that yes, we do.
In a few short weeks, Sarah Palin has produced enough poppycock to keep parsers and diagrammers busy for a long time. In the end, though, out of her mass of verbiage in the Sean Hannity interview, Palin did manage to emit a perfectly lucid diagram-ready statement that sums up, albeit modestly, not the state of the economy that she was (more or less) talking about but the quality of her thinking:
I wonder if sentence diagramming could be used to determine the Book of Mormon's authenticity.