I don't have a television and my internet connection here is pretty choppy, so I haven't been able to watch the debates. I've been reading the transcripts in the days after the debates, instead.
I don't know if it's different when you watch it happening in real time, but reading the transcripts one thing stands out, glaring and harsh: Sarah Palin does not know how to use the English language.
Maybe it's nerves, but every one of her responses reads as though it were translated from English to another language and then translated back again. I don't agree with a lot of what she has to say, but it's hard to tell when her answers take the form of garbled nonsense.
Stop using the word "also." From now on, you may only use the word "also" ten times in one evening. You'd better make them count.
The things that she says don't just make me angry because of their content; when I read the things that come out of her mouth, I feel a rush of the kind of frustration junior high school teachers must feel after having to grade fifteen papers in a row and write on them all: "keep consistent with verb tenses. Don't overuse the thesaurus if you can't integrate the words you find in a way that makes sense."
I misused the word "recalcitrant" the other day. I feel really, really stupid about that. But this woman. This woman's words written on the page conjure an image of George W. Bush wearing a wig and Tina Fey glasses.
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