Sarah Palin’s memoir,
, finally hits bookstores on Tuesday, long after preorders on Amazon.com made it a best-seller. According to the AP, the new book is ”
,” suggesting that Palin has translated her distinctive speaking style to the printed page.
What, exactly, is the former governor’s style? In a
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
. Using transcripts from the 2008
, they also found that she engaged in ”
” (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.
