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Posted

Last week, Jeb(!) Bush came under fire from Donald Trump — generally a sign that you are doing something right.

In this case, the thing that Jeb! was doing right was answering a question in fluent Spanish. Trump didn’t like it, just as Trump don’t like it any time anyone speaks and Trump cannot understand (so, not in the third person and using words of more than one syllable).

And Sarah Palin agreed. Palin apparently wants to be Trump’s energy secretary (discussing this fantasy Cabinet at greater length will be my alternative to football this season) and has been saying lots of things to show her fitness for the position — “I think a lot about the Department of Energy, because energy is my baby: oil and gas and minerals, those things that God has dumped on this part of the earth for mankind’s use instead of us relying on unfriendly foreign nations.”

Yes, “Those things that God has dumped on this part of the earth for mankind’s use” — I checked several times to make sure this was not an Onion video, because it seemed so unsubtle in its wording.

When she was not talking about God’s dumps, Palin had more words for those from foreign nations, friendly and otherwise.

“Speak American!”

She told Jake Tapper, “I think we can send a message and say, ‘You want to be in America, A, you’d better be here legally or you’re out of here. B, when you’re here, let’s speak American. . . . Let’s speak English, and that’s a kind of a unifying aspect of the nation is the language that is understood by all.”

Perhaps that explains everything. She was speaking American this whole time, not English. So, for that matter, was Trump.

Here is a sentence by Donald Trump, ostensibly in the common language that is understood by all.

AHxUc1b.jpg

Is it possible that Palin and Trump do not grasp the sublime irony of people who do these things to the English language complaining that others don’t use it properly, or at all? If English were a rental car, the people at the desk would panic and hide every time Sarah Palin walked in. Whenever she uses it, it comes back dented in strange places. This critique is like the pot calling on the kettle to such a great extent that we comprehend so well, so sincerely, here in this great land, not just here but in our heart of hearts, under God, furthermore.

Both she and Trump possess their own unique syntaxes. He sounds like a 4-year-old paraphrasing a political speech. “Trump will make America great. Trump is very huge and smart. Trump will build a big wall. Trump knows nuclear!” She sounds like she has been trapped in the question portion of the Miss America pageant for the past decade. When it started, someone told her that you were allocated only a single sentence but that as long as you said “furthermore” periodically it could go on for as long as you liked. Watching the two of them try to converse on One America News Network was like Oscar Wilde’s famous quip about fox-hunting — “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.”

Perhaps this is the explanation: This whole time, they were alone in speaking something that wasn’t English at all. They spoke American.

American is all form and no content. All sizzle, no steak, like such as and therefore. American is what you speak during a pageant — and, increasingly, during an election. It’s something like English, but not quite. It has separate dialects for male and female. American (masculine): all boast, all noun and verb, all Trump, a kind of bad parody of Hemingway forced to give a political speech without ever mentioning any proper nouns — and American (feminine): cliche-ridden (never “in our heart” but “in our heart of hearts”; never “this country” but “this great nation under God”; never “destiny” but “manifest destiny”) beating back against the current, borne back ceaselessly toward a comma splice, dragging a heavy chain of clanking cliche everywhere it goes, Palin-style. This is what Real Americans speak. I speak American, and so can you!

Read my lips: No new syntaxes! Let’s make American great again!

That, or she briefly misspoke. But you know what they say about gaffes: They’re when you accidentally say what you mean.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2015/09/08/sarah-palin-and-donald-trump-ask-other-people-to-speak-american-i-knew-what-they-were-speaking-was-not-english/

Posted

now that i've had a moment to think this 'speak american' nonsense over..i think palin should go back to sunday school. god wants us to all speak different languages..if we all spoke the same language our collective verbal power would be a threat. tower of babel, people.

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Posted (edited)

now that i've had a moment to think this 'speak american' nonsense over..i think palin should go back to sunday school. god wants us to all speak different languages..if we all spoke the same language our collective verbal power would be a threat. tower of babel, people.

A cardboard cutout of Palin with a speech chip that says "you betcha" when you push a button would be more competent than the real thing.

Edited by Trumplestiltskin
Posted

A cardboard cutout of Palin with a speech chip that says "you betcha" when you push a button would be more competent than the real thing.

i would appreciate some variety, like "you betcha' and "my babies are god dumps!" and more of this sort "“Trump will make America great. Trump is very huge and smart. Trump will build a big wall. Trump knows nuclear!”"

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Posted

i would appreciate some variety, like "you betcha' and "my babies are god dumps!" and more of this sort "Trump will make America great. Trump is very huge and smart. Trump will build a big wall. Trump knows nuclear!"

If it weren't for Palin we wouldn't have the turkey slaughter press conference. Worth hitting up on youtube

 

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