Five years in which to graduate from college, and five different colleges, one attended twice. None is a high-quality college, and she does not have the excuse of having been in the military or stopping out to get some contact with reality outside the Ivory Tower. She had trouble with college in Hawaii with surely a large number of Asian-American students, some of whom are not native speakers of English. Heck, I attended UC Berkeley and I knew the way in which to communicate with people who are not native speakers of English, which is to stick to the formal register because that is the language taught in English classes for anyone who isn't a native speaker of English, and don't make linguistic formations that are clever but unclear. Such is the same whether the original language of the speaker is Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Tagalog, Arabic, Finnish -- or even Dutch (the language closest to English). I was surprised at times at how good the English was of someone born perhaps in Vietnam -- but my English (and word choice) had to be good enough to be understood too.



Sarah Palin frequently goes into the non-formal register that non-native speakers of English find difficult to understand. She coined the word "refudiate" (the spell check is flashing with that word) and uses words in non-conventional ways, as in "Barack Obama pals with terrorists". When she was running for President polls showed that even if she did reasonably well instates with few non-native speakers of English, she did extremely badly with people who weren't native speakers of English. She was doing worse in Texas than she was doing in New Hampshire. Contrast Mike Huckabee, who may be even more reactionary... but nobody finds him confusing.



Poor grammar and misuse of words is inconsistent with someone born into an English-speaking world and who has a college degree... and a high level of intelligence. So is lacking a clue that one is in trouble in a social situation. I recognized that she was not up to campaigning for a President when she made her "Real America" speech in Chillicothe, Ohio that disparaged urban America and had no idea that the microphones picking up her speech were from Columbus, one of the heavily-populated versions of Sodom and Gomorrah for being urban. It went well in Chillicothe but badly in Columbus and then went all over America and proved a flop in places like Indianapolis, Denver, Las Vegas, Charlotte, Miami, and Norfolk. She lacked any clue on how media operate in America even if she had been a sportscaster and lacked the curiosity to ask what TV market she was in.





