Several weekends ago humorist and former talk show host Dick Cavett blogged about Sarah Palin's mangling of the English language in his regular New York Times column Talk Show.

Cavett's article, entitled The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla, didn't have to slander or attack Palin to illustrate that her speech is nearly incomprehensible (at least to him), he only had to quote her.

Here is a brief excerpt from Cavett's blog:

What on earth are our underpaid teachers, laboring in the vineyards of education, supposed to tell students about the following sentence, committed by the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High and gleaned by my colleague Maureen Dowd for preservation for those who ask, “How was it she talked?”

"My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars."

And, she concluded, “never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.”

Just as George Bush has become the political master of malaprop, Sarah Palin seems to have an equivalent gift for word salad. No matter what your political inclinations, if you can't laugh at the quote, "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your families," (Bush), then you seriously need a vacation. And if you can't see that the above quote from Palin makes almost no rational sense in its own right, then, well, I don't know--then I guess you're a Palin fan.

Palin fans soon found they were not alone when post-Feminist academician Camille Paglia took Cavett to task at Salon.com for attacking Palin's 'patois.' (I wonder if Palin even knows she has a 'patois' or where it might be located on her body.) Paglia defended Palin's speech as "...quick, sometimes jagged, but always exuberant...closer to street rapping than to the smug bourgeouis cadences of the affluent professional class."

Paglia goes on to excoriate Cavett thusly:

I was so outraged when I read Cavett's column that I felt like taking to the air like a Valkyrie and dropping on him at his ocean retreat in Montauk in the chichi Hamptons. 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?

I personally have always thought of Paglia as something of a Valkyrie, so it made me feel a little less bitchy to know she sees herself that way too. I really can't stand her at all. She's even more offensive to me than Ayn Rand. (I'm sure my disapproval would crush both of them...Not!) It's true that Cavett, a Yale graduate who used to hang around with William F. Buckley, can be a snob, but he's so funny about it that it's pretty hard to not to love him.

Paglia on the other hand is such a shrill, opportunistic, unapologetic whore of the academy that it's really hard to like her even a little bit, even when she has half a point. If cloistered Paglia thinks for one second that she somehow speaks for the common man/woman/postgendered creature (and sometimes I get the sense she really does think this, but other times it seems Paglia really doesn't care for whom she speaketh so long as her speech gets published, and published a lot)--if she thinks for a NY minute that she speaks for us little people, she can count this particular little person out.

She doesn't speak for me.

But then, neither does Cavett, as much as I love him. Not really.

This whole catfight got me to thinking, what is really going on here? What is it we are witnessing in print? Here we have two very elite literary Peanut Gallerians sniping over the common folk and their [sic:our] diction or lack thereof; both of them staking claim to authority over what constitutes proper American speech and over who gets to say so.

Wow. What a bizarre but interesting debate!

Bizarre because both parties claim to be both outside and inside the groups they are criquing (the working class, academia). Interesting because I believe class and culture really do impact American language and how it is wielded in remarkable and sometimes hilarious ways.

You can argue about proper English all you want--In fact, if you are William Safire you can make a living out of doing exactly that--but that kind of argument can be solved quickly by opening a dictionary or a grammar book. On the other hand, the debate about who speaks proper American--Now there's an interesting fight!

I'd definitely buy a ticket to that fight.

Do we even know who the winner is? If there are indeed many American ways of speaking, then precisely how many American dialects are there? Can we count them? Which are the major competitors? Which competitors are currently winning? Is it even rightly called a fight? If so, is it a fair fight?

Or, by contrast, is the American language currently just devolving into a collection of English-derivations so specific to the micro-environments Americans navigate that they are becoming separate languages in their own right? Is American even a single language anymore? Was it ever?

These are the kinds of questions I'd like to address in this hub.

I've written before about growing up in the rougher, working class part of the Rustbelt. At least,I mention it a lot here at Hub Pages, because I do remember class being a huge issue when I was a kid, and it seems to still be a huge issue now that I am an adult. What I don't write about very much is how it affected how I spoke and even how I thought, but it certainly applies here.

A little backstory:

My Dad didn't see any point in sending a girl to college, but for boys he saw college as a shot at white collar work. White collar work was seen as a social class above the one he himself occupied, and strangely, the nature of the work didn't even seem to matter so long as it involved wearing a suit and working indoors.

He wanted that for my brother, and that was not an unusual aspiration.

I can't tell you how many guys I grew up with went to college purely because "I want to do something where I wear a suit. I don't care what it is, so long as it's not factory or construction work and its indoors."

Guys pick up real early that the word 'redneck' is not a compliment.

Anyway, since my Dad was so dismissive of sending girls to college (he figured girls were best moved up the class ladder by means of a good marriage), I decided that of course I would go to college, against his wishes, whatever it took, and hopefully drive him and my brother mad in the process.

I soon discovered, however, that while attending college I needed to be fluent in two languages: 1) The language spoken back in the neighborhood at family gatherings and with old friends, and 2) the language spoken at the university if I expected to get a passing grade.

Mixing up the two languages resulted in an immediate slap-down.

If I spoke the way we did back home at college, I was mocked, corrected, or at best, made the object of snickers and giggles. If I spoke at home the way I was required to speak at the university, I was quickly "taken down a peg" with the same tactics--mockery, correction (as in, "Well, that sounds like one of those fancy ideas you picked up at college"),or by being made the object or derision, giggling, or eye-rolling.

The vernacular of the neighborhood and the dinner table included lots of double negatives, swear words, short direct sentences, and a very personal tone. (Palin's rambling would never have cut it in my old neighborhhood--She'd have never been able to finish even one of those endless non-sentences before some guy shut her up.)

In sharp contrast, the language of the university consisted of complete spoken sentences (verb, noun, proper sentence structure), no swearing, large words appropriately and judiciously used ('judiciously' would be one of those words), and indirect language that invited cross talk or further exposition. The language of the university, even if it was meant to eviscerate the listener (or target), was excruciatingly impersonal.

In many ways, the two languages were oppositional--Not just in the sense that the way they were structured was opposite each other--but also in the sense that the structure of each language itself was meant to convey opposition to the alternative. No small amount of derision for the other class is built into both of these ways of talking. The academy puts down the working class in the very structure of its speech and the topics it selects. Working class talk sneers at or even moons the intellectual class.

I guess that for brevity's sake I should make up some names for these two languages. Let's call the two languages Prolese (for working class lingo) and Snottish (for intellectual discourse).

Jumping ahead a bit (and I think you'll see this by and by) I don't think Palin's way of talking really fits into either of these models, which is probably what troubles me about it most of all, and why I think Cavett and Paglia are both off the mark in their critiques. Palin is no Eliza Doolittle, and John McCain was a piss poor Henry Higgins. Not that the metaphor is totally misplaced.

But we'll get to that later.

First a few examples of what I'm talking about with college and my old 'hood:

Prolese: F#%k you, bitch. Kiss my ass. You must be trippin'.

Snottish: Although the workplace is indeed becoming more flexible and non-hierarchical as we enter the postmodern era, it is still vital that conflicts be approached with an eye to procedure so that human resources can be maximized in any given application.

Neutral translation: That's not my job and you are not my boss. Go away.

Here's another, more political example:

Prolese: I am not payin' my hard earned money so some n*gger bitch can sit home and squeeze off more kids by all different guys. F@%k that.

Snottish: The socio-economic issues confronting the distribution of funds to certain social subgroups can and do pose a serious dilemma for a free market society. The Faustian bargain struck when funds are too freely distributed can lead to moral hazard, and yet, we cannot dismiss the challenges presented.

Neutral translation: Both of us fear black people and want to keep all our money, such as it is, for ourselves.

Palin's speech is personal but it is not direct like Prolese--in fact it is even more indirect than Snottish--so indirect it often doesn't say anything at all. And yet, unlike Snottish, Palin isn't grammatically correct when she talks and she leaves out any large words, so Snottish it ain't. You might think that Palin therefore speaks some new combination of Prolese and Snottish--Prolish, maybe. But no. It isn't that straightforward.

I think that a new American dialect has been emerging over the course of the past ten years which may well make both Prolese and Snottish dead languages, and I fear that Palin actually speaks a kind of hybrid of Prolese and this new category.

That's a bad thing. A very bad thing. Let me explain.

As many of you who are kind enough to read my hubs also know, I spent the last seven years working in the call centers of huge corporations. The last one, the one that finally pushed me over the edge, was a major regional bank.

The day Bear Stearns went belly up, that bank's stock fell to under $2 a share. Immediately, and every day for the next several months (sometimes every several hours) we received emailed "talking points" from corporate HQ that read something like this:

Despite the recent volatility in the DOW, First Irrational Bank is well-capitalized and well-positioned to meet the challenges of today's financial markets. At First Irrational Bank we continue to place the needs of our customers and stockholders above all else, responding to new challenges swiftly and with our usual standard of excellence.

For those of you who have never worked for a large corporation and who have never spent the bulk of your time chained to a headset inside a tiny grey cublice, let me translate that memo for you.

Here's what the memo means in regular English:

Oh my God we are so totally F#&ked! Run for your lives! Every man for himself! Oh yeah... and dont' tell the customers!

When this memo started to be put out as a press release, I told my partner Bill, "Well, it won't be long now. A week or less I bet," and sure enough, shortly thereafter the bank was sold off by the Treasury Department in lieu of being seized by F.D.I.C. Once the sale is final in January, the name will be changed and most of the employees will be eliminated.

Corporatespeak always requires translation, and the translation tends to usually involve simply reversing the surface message to get at the real message. For instance, in the case of the bank memo, we knew we were in trouble when that came out because a corporation never comes out of the blue to say they are doing great unless they are in big trouble.

When corporations are truly doing well, the memos are more about how the employees better work harder because goals are not being met. That kind of memo--the "You suck, work harder" memo--means, "We're making lots of money. Make us more. Keep doing it and you have a job."

Getting back to Sarah Palin's rhetorical style, I see a lot of Corporatespeak there. Remember all that blather about how small towns are the backbone of America? Well, very few people live in small towns anymore. Most people live in large metropolitan centers.

The whole "small town schtick" with Palin was corporatespeak for "Let me into Washington. I get money. I talk trash, get cash." Really the exact opposite of the overt message, "I'm a small town girl with small town values," especially since Palin hired a big city public relations firm to put her front and center even before McCain 'chose' her as his running mate.

Palin speaks Corporate with a Prolese twang. A few well-placed "youbetchas" and a penchant for run-on sentences that say nothing while her designer clothes do their own talkin' fits seamlessly into any corporate boardroom. And the twang gets the Proles to the poles! Intellect is totally irrelevant here. Even class is irrelevant. This is all about the money and the cult of corporate personality. Palin, Trump, Fiorina--These players are almost interchangeable.

So--I think it matters, this business of how we talk and who gets to critique how we talk and who's zoomin' who(m). It matters quite a lot actually, but we aren't paying attention, only people like Dick Cavett and Camille Paglia, both of whom have a stake in an old, defunct battle, are paying attention. They don't speak for me, and they don't speak for most of us, but we aren't thinking or speaking for ourselves. (Well, we at Hub Pages are trying to speak. Until our words get stolen and disappear into the ethernet like so much verbal fog...)

So--If we don't listen to the subtext as well as text and then factor in the point of view of the speaker, we fall under the spell of language. We literally become 'enchanted'--taken over by chant, by cadence--absorbing and believing meanings we ought better to resist. We become prey. We can be shot at out of helicopters as we run across the American tundra and never feel the bullet even as we give up our lives and our selves for the predator.

The written and spoken word in America are both in a state of radical flux right now, and I think it isn't so much exhilirating as it is scary. It's kind of like watching a monster movie, where scary, marginalized creatures morph into demon chimeras before our very eyes, casting 'spells' on us before we have a chance to respond appropriately. That's why education is so important now, and reading, and writing, and critical thinking are so vital to true freedom. That's why writing is so very important now, at the very moment when it is hardest for voices like ours, here, to be heard much less appear in print.

As Americans, we need to teach these skills again, but more than that, as Americans we need to value these skills. We need to claim and admire them and make them our own. You shouldn't have to live in Montauk or have a Ph.D. publication quota to speak your mind in the language you use best and to understand what others are really saying when they counter in their own American dialect.

Part of the Prolese script is the premise that intellect and talk has no value; only hard work and street smarts have value. The Snottish script values intellect and talk so highly above work and wits that it pretends the personal doesn't even exist, even when it is right in our faces. Corporatespeak, especially the Palin-esque variety, combines the anti-intellectualism of Prolese with the false authority of Snottish and uses it to enslave the listener through razzle dazzle and bamboozlement.

George Orwell, in his famous novel 1984 called Corporatespeak "Doublespeak."

Whatever you call it, It's crap. (That was the old neighborhood in me talking, just now.) In Palin's version of Pygmalion (the George Bernard Shaw play on which My Lady is based), it's the guttersnipe Palin who takes on her American tutor to see if she can make him bend to her mean-spirited will on a bet--an appropriate reversal if ever there was one.

My Fair Lady or Frankenstein?

You be the judge.

Meanwhile, I've got some memos to write.

No sh%t. Run for you're lives.