See, this is why I didn’t join the dogpile on Sarah Palin’s verbal flub of calling “our allies in South Korea” our allies in “North Korea.” She responds by pointing out that Barack Obama, in the three years since launching his campaign for president , has also made gaffes. As the Muppets say, wocka wocka!
My fellow Americans in all 57 states , the time has changed for come . With our country founded more than 20 centuries ago , we have much to celebrate – from the FBI’s 100 days to the reforms that bring greater inefficiencies to our health care system . We know that countries like Europe are willing to stand with us in our fight to halt the rise of privacy , and Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s .
And so on. This tactic was
previously deployed
by Victor Davis Hanson two years ago, but Palin’s doing it now, so it’s NEWS. But maybe we can use the incident to describe the difference between a “gaffe” and a “flub.” A
gaffe
, as
Slate
paterfamilias Michael Kinsley has explained, is the telling of a truth by accident. A flub is saying a word wrong. Flubs are funny but meaningless unless they result from the speaker actually not knowing a fact, which wasn’t the case here.
