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"I?ve always loved Camille. Maybe I should have told her."

Dick Cavett deals with Camille Paglia's attack on his attack on Sarah Palin.

Camille said:

... Cavett's piece on Sarah Palin was insufferably supercilious. With dripping disdain, he sniffed at her "frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences." He called her "the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High," "one who seems to have no first language."...

How can it be that so many highly educated Americans have so little historical and cultural consciousness that they identify their own native patois as an eternal mark of intelligence, talent and political aptitude?

In sonorous real life, Cavett's slow, measured, self-interrupting and clause-ridden syntax is 50 years out of date. Guess what: There has been a revolution in English -- registered in the 1950s in the street slang, colloquial locutions and assertive rhythms of both Beat poetry and rock 'n' roll and now spread far and wide on the Web in the standard jazziness of blogspeak. Does Cavett really mean to offer himself as a linguistic gatekeeper for political achievers in this country?

Ha ha. Really. (I say in blogspeak, proving Cavett's a dick.)

I am very sorry that he, and so many other members of the educational elite, cannot take pleasure as I do in the quick, sometimes jagged, but always exuberant way that Palin speaks -- which is closer to street rapping than to the smug bourgeois cadences of the affluent professional class.

Dick says:

Some of what Ms. P. says is so dumb that I assumed, at first, that it was meant to be funny. But I think I?m wrong. It would be strange of her ? considering the number of arrows already in her daunting intellectual quiver ? to suddenly attempt humor.

That's very old-fashioned humor, you know, Dick. The street rappers of today would never put it like that.

I seem to remember Sarah Palin rapping, though. Oh, yeah, here.

When I say Obama, you say Ayers...

Full post as published by Althouse on December 16, 2008 (boomark / email).