Manners are free; birthday dinners aren't.

In ConcernSimian's assessment, Palin's "florid, babbling ideation" is tantamount to what psychiatrists might call a "word salad." But ezames warns against any such pathologizing:

the little I've read about linguistics suggests, counter-intuitively, that the coherence and diagramability of [Palin's] speech aren't reliable indicators of her intelligence or clarity of thought. Chomsky's notion that language isn't the product of some sort of general intelligence, but of a specific module in the brain, is generally accepted today.

JerseyInsuranceGirl wonders, should Palin get elected, how translators will revamp and interpret her sentences in foreign languages. Scotboy56 gives it a try, and "with a few judicious uses/changes of punctuation, and one reordering of words," manages to make the Palin quote "read perfectly":

I know that John McCain and I, as his vice president, will do that. Families, we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20. That will be. Our top priority is to defend the American people.

Not bad. Do you have a more coherent take? Consult the original here and then post your translation in "The Good Word" Fray. AC … 11:20 a.m. ET

Tuesday, Oct. 7,  2008

We love it when the post titles tell the story. The Swedish Academy speaks on why Americans don't win Nobel Prizes for literature, Adam Kirsch puts the case for homegrown fiction, and readers get to comment on all of it. A quick scan of the "Culturebox" board gives the following posts: U.S. writers robbed by Nobel Committee; most Nobel literature is boring; good to know America isn't the only place with bigots; Nobel nordicentrism; MFAs killed American literature; Europe is finished, anyway ("skinny French women … will all be in burkhas"); Danielle Steel.

Danielle Steel? By no means is she the only author who has been omitted from the prize-giving, thanks only to the sheer prejudice and anti-American feeling of the committee, apparently. But we would still challenge readers to guess what name is going to come after these words from Bec393: "[T]he only living American writer worthy of a Nobel nom is ..."—go and see, prepare to be surprised (maybe).

Bjoern Staerk says America's greatest contribution to literature is science fiction and goes on:

But then literary fame is not about justice. I've given up counting the number of wonderful authors I've come across by accident, only to find out that they're utterly forgotten and ignored. Perhaps the real problem with the Nobel Prize and other awards is that they give readers the illusion of knowing who the greatest authors are. The odds are that the world's greatest author wrote one promising book which didn't sell well, then gave up writing for a paying job.