Lisa would flee. (This was, in fact, Ms. Palin’s response.) In a conversation, you have to build your sentence phrase by phrase, monitoring the reaction of your listener, while aiming for relevance to the question. That’s what led Ms. Palin into word salad with Ms. Couric. But when the questioner is 30 feet away on the floor and you’re on a stage talking to a camera, which can’t interrupt or make faces, you can reel off a script without embarrassment. The concerns raised by the Couric interviews  that Ms. Palin memorizes talking points rather than grasping issues  should not be allayed by her performance in the forgiving format of a debate.

The second myth about Ms. Palin is that her accent is contrived, or that it reveals laziness or ignorance on her part. Certainly, Ms. Palin cranked the folksiness dial to 11 during the debate: she dropped more g’s, reverted to “nucular” after being teleprompted during the Republican National Convention to pronounce it “new-clear,” and salted her speech with cutesy near profanities like “darn,” “heck” and “doggone.”

But it would be unfair to question the authenticity of her accent or to use it as a measure of her intellect or sophistication. The dialect is certainly for real. Listeners who hear the Minnewegian sounds of the characters from “Fargo” when they listen to Ms. Palin are on to something: the Matanuska-Susitna Valley in Alaska, where she grew up, was settled by farmers from Minnesota during the Depression.

And no, “nucular” is not a sign of ignorance. This reversal of vowel-like consonants (nuk-l’-yer > nuk-y’-ler) is common in the world’s languages, and is no more illiterate than pronouncing “iron” the way most Americans do, as “eye-yern” instead of “eye-ren.”

Nor is Ms. Palin guilty of laziness in “dropping g’s,” because there is no such thing as “dropping g’s.” The sounds at the end of “nothing” and “nothin’” are different consonants (linguists call them “eng” and “en”), one produced with the tongue on the gum ridge, the other with the tongue on the soft palate. We just spell the second one with two letters. We all flip between “eng” and “en” in our speech, though lower-class speakers do it more, and everyone does it more when the conversation is more casual. It’s the output of an informality dial that all of us, regardless of accent, twiddle as we tune our speech to the circumstances.