Can We Be Correct When We Open Our Mouths?

Occassionally I will be grabbing egregious errors in print or over the air -- even overheard, but there usually are too many overheard -- and ranting a bit about them here. Today's entry comes courtesy of the flu pandemic. Actually, there are two entries. The first is trying to change the media from saying "swine flu" rather than "H1N1." So not going to happen. Lots of poor pigs will suffer. . . .

Next comes to us from none other than Janet Napolitano herself. She was asked why the US doesn't use thermal imaging devices at our borders or airports to identify people who are sick. She spoke correctly about people being contageous before symptoms appear, thereby rendering the thermal imaging devices less than perfect. She then went on to say that these devices don't always register "people who have temperatures."

Um, if we have a pulse, we have a temperature. Or, do we have a previously unreported problem of dead people crossing our borders? What she meant to say was
fever, I think.

Sigh.

On No! Not Another Language Mangler

I suffered through the Bush II presidency. Not because of his policies, because I agreed with some of them. I didn't agree with all of them. But it was his mangling of the English (or American) language that pained me. I read The Bush Dyslexicon and wept. And that was written before he was elected.

I alternately laughed and wept again listening to Sarah Palin adlib a response to anyone. Like many people, I tried to keep an open mind about her qualifications, and yet when she tried to speak off the stump speech, I saw the ramblings of a disjointed mind. The most highly quoted gaff went viral in print, in the blog-s-sphere and in cyberspace within minutes of Katie Couric's interview on 60 Minutes.

"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."


I lamented the fracturing of syntax to several of my favorite grammar police, all of whom returned my concern. However, only Becky Mushko outdid Sarah with her own spoof. Yes, this is an insider's joke, but I had to share the "sentence" with y'all.

"Well, yeah, but yanno that inspired me enough that I was like thinking kind of that maybe in the course of giving response critique-wise to certain folks who are not really seeking critiques that when they read, which is almost every meeting of a certain organization except, of course, when they're not there, which once in a while they are not, that we could maybe employ certain Palinistic rhetorical devices to maybe detrail the train of verbosity they exude or at least Palinetically hijack its caboose, ya think?"

Ya betcha! One seriously fractured sentence. Thanks to Becky for lifting my spirits and making me ROTFLOL.