If it weren't for the Simpsons, I would have no idea who Dick Cavett is, and I believe that other people in my generation feel the same way. In one of the most joke-laden episodes ever created, "Homie the Clown," Dick Cavett plays an irksome hanger-on to Homer, who he believes is Krusty the Clown.
It was a noble performance, and without having any exposure to his talk show, I assumed it indicated his wit and sagacity. Oh, but his new column has removed all doubt.
Dick, numero uno of most-emailed articles this Sunday morning: The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla. Note that this was not published paper, this is an NYT Blog.
The essence of his article, riffing from Maureen Dowd's Sarah's Pompom Palaver Article, is that Sarah Palin has poor grammar in speech.
Both Maureen Dowd and Dick Cavett have struck a low blow with this theme. Quite simply, there is a difference between speech grammar and written grammar. To quote someone's speech verbatim, unless they're giving a speech (which is written in advance and, in presidential races, written by a team of people), is going to yield grammatical errors unacceptable in writing. Sentences run on in speech because the speaker is finishing a thought rather than designating a pause for a period. In fact, I am reassured that Sarah Palin does not speak like a textbook because it indicates that her answers are not rehearsed. Rehearsal of answers and always saying the right thing is an excellent way to prevent honesty from seeping through. What's more, I will give Katie Couric credit for picking questions that avoided canned answers.
Their columns take the high-handed approach of judging someone's manner of expression as a prerequisite for public office (or even public exposure). It is right to judge someone for the adequacy or inadequacy of the answer, but to infer that idiosyncrasies indicate a lack of intelligence is frankly another shot fired in the culture war. There are many people who identify with Sarah Palin, the person. By making fun of her way of speech, will that attract people to the new presidential agenda or galvanize them as the cultural opposition?
As a side note, I am not a grammar crusader but I do have a comment for Dick Cavett's combination of grammar and style: his article had 9 rhetorical questions, two back-to-back parenthetical remarks, and one declarative sentence ended with a question mark. It's a blog and an opinion piece, but it seems that Dick Cavett wants to fight this grammar-culture war in the trenches and not from up high.
Posts
2 comments:
Hmm I definitely see your point here, but if we are considering electing a person to the 2nd highest political office in the land, where she will have extreme global exposure and be a representative of this country, shouldn't she be expected to be able to construct an unrehearsed complete sentence? Whether these articles needed to be published in the NYTimes aside (I don't think they should have been either, this story is done, let's move on) after eight years of having a leader who continually made up words and sounded like an idiot, I'm excited at the prospect of having someone in office who doesn't try to answer questions with a wink and a shrug.
I agree that we need a leader who actually answers questions. Having her stand up in a debate and say that she's going to answer questions 'her way' was an embarassment and would have been frightful in the international arena. Everyone talks about qualifications to be president, or some NYT writers think that there are no qualifications, but I would say that a character assesment based on the substance of her words excludes her from that office.
Who knows what can happen in four years, though!
Post a Comment