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On Monday, we wondered whether any of Sarah Palin's folksy phrasings would make it into her new memoir, Going Rogue. In particular, how many times would "You betcha!" appear in print?
Fellow Slate staffer Christopher Beam went through the whole book yesterday, and reports just one instance of the famous phrase. On page 309, the author reminisces about the anxious hours before her appearance on Saturday Night Live in the fall of 2008. Not having seen the script for the show, she and her entourage decided to make their own comedy pitches:
"What about a skit where I pretended to be a journalist and asked Tina condescending questions: ‘What do you use for newspapers up in Alaska—tree bark?' ‘What happens if the moose were given guns? It wouldn't be so easy then, eh?' ‘Is "you betcha" your state motto?' We sent our ideas up the line, and somebody smacked ‘em down."
You'll recall that a group of linguists recently studied the transcript of Palin's vice-presidential debate and concluded that she uses the words heck and darn at least 20 times more often than other people in comparable settings. Do those figures hold up in the new book? A bit of noodling with Amazon's "Look Inside" feature reveals at least four uses of darn (e.g., "He agreed to give up chew for a day. That was a big darn deal") and six of heck (e.g., "I felt guilty as heck").
Given that the book contains about 130,000 words, the darn and heck rates are, respectively, 30.8 and 46.1 per million words. The linguists cite comparable standard rates of 3.2 and 7.4. Even in print, Palin applies these folksy expressions far more often than other people.
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Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue, finally hits bookstores on Tuesday, long after preorders on Amazon.com made it a best-seller. According to the AP, the new book is "folksy in tone and homespun," suggesting that Palin has translated her distinctive speaking style to the printed page.
What, exactly, is the former governor's style? In a new study for the Journal of English Linguistics, a team of linguists from University of Wisconsin-Madison found that she uses the words heck and darn at least 20 times more often than her contemporary Americans. Using transcripts from the 2008 vice-presidential debate, they also found that she engaged in "g-dropping" (e.g. "people are hurtin'" or "takin' personal responsibility") at an unusually high rate of 12 percent. Then, of course, there's her signature phrase: You betcha!
Now we're wondering whether Palin's verbal tics will make their way past the copy editors at HarperCollins and into the typeset pages of the memoir. How many times will You betcha! appear in the 432-page, published book? At least one of my colleagues believes it won't show up at all; I'm guessing she'll drop the phrase at least 10 times. I'd be shocked if it doesn't turn out to be the last sentence of the introduction—something like, "Do I love America? You betcha!"
We'll report back on our findings later in the week.
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I'll say this for the excerpt from Frank Bruni's memoir that appears in this weekend's New York Times Magazine: Never before has a story of bulimia made me so desperately hungry. "Macaroni and cheese. There was macaroni and cheese. It looked sort of congealed and stiff at the edges. I love it when it's sort of congealed and stiff at the edges." Yes, yes—me, too!
It's a wonderful piece, but I'm a little bothered by what it says, or implies, about our relationship with food. Bruni makes it sound as if he's been endlessly skirting between the Scylla of overeating and the Charybdis of bulimia. (According to Michael Pollan's blurb for the book, he's "plumbing the depths of our personal and collective eating disorders.") Yet there's no real evidence that the author was ever fat to begin with. Sure, he may have been chubby as a kid, but according to the memoir, he was 5-foot-10 in high school, and about 180 pounds. That translates to a body mass index of 25.8, or just barely "overweight," according to the standard cutoffs.
If anything, Bruni seems to have been much healthier than most Americans. Studies have repeatedly found that those who register as slightly overweight (on body mass index) live longer than people in the "normal" range. Bruni's a clear example of why that might be the case: As the star of his high-school swim team, he spent hours in the pool every day—a practice that surely contributed more muscle mass, and an inflated BMI. (At the time, writes Bruni, his doctor recommended that he lose "5 to 10 pounds." That was bad advice.)
Another clue emerges when Bruni shows up for his freshman year at UNC-Chapel Hill. He signs up for a fitness class, but at the first meeting "the teacher talked about something called a body-fat index, then produced a contraption with pinchers to grab and measure any folds of fat around our waists ... I registered a higher body fat index than half of the other students. And dropped the class later that same day." But if he was fatter that half of the other students, that means he was thinner than half of them, too. Young Bruni was exactly average.
It's fine with me if Frank Bruni wants to be skinny for aesthetic reasons. (In the Times piece, at least, he never claims another motivation for his diets and purges.) But let's be careful about what we call overeating. If he wasn't putting his body at risk, then why make it sound like a problem?
Crusty Mac 'n Cheese photograph courtesy of Spike Mafford/Getty Images.