Everywhere I ramble the talk is on Sarah Palin, (SarahSpeak you know, talkin' also, too), and the economy (where DepressionSpeak is not politically correct). Think of Mark Twain or even Dante, both of whom wrote in the vernacular and in doing so, gained a huge audience. Twain took up American-ese and did not write in the King's English but in the then-Westernisms of plain folk talk. Dante wrote to the folks not in the high literate language of the day, Latin, but in the language that was spoken everyday.
Syntax as Brain Gum: And so, also, Six-Pack Sarah's syntax is so, you know, stopping us all in our tracks and impact. It has it, too, impact, the impact of it all. Yokel or elitism? The oddness of it is riveting and the brain-wrap on this has everyone trying to diagram her ordinary/unordinary-ness as if she were a sentence herself. Don't we quickly forget that we've lost our regional colloquialisms. Educated people and leaders speak with American media-esque standards, which is to say all-the-same and regionally unidentifiable. Just in a generation. You can hear Boston, Brooklyn, Charleston and Amarillo tilt and lilt if you go there, but not much on the media main stage. It is not muy bueno to parler differently. Maureen Dowd writes about her "homespun haikus... her pompom patois" and my mother gets prickly about the meanness of the media.
Economic Unmentionables: It is like a dance around death to hear the way the market sink is all presented. Just as we might pick up our way of speaking from the books we read, the media we pay attention to or the way we talk with those around us (ok, I can't help but falling here into what I've listened to with Sarah on the stage), likewise, also, we pick up the flow unconsciously, too, also. Mention Depression and we all sink. It isn't done. Just like dying, we "pass over" the subject. I pulled up the October 24, 1929 NYTimes story that sort of started it all shaking out. If you see or read the headlines, you don't see the panic and it is like how we use euphemisms and tuck away death. We're so used to consumerism and being told to want and buy that the headlines can't go there, the commentators tip toe around the topic. I started to study Media and the Economic Crisis and a cursory overview is that when the jitters set in, it becomes all about Palin. Thing Two overtakes Thing One.
The Snippet of Sarah, the naming of our Economic Woes-of-this-Moment: The Great Depression became so, only after it was long over, like The Great War or The War Between The States became other things generally, like The Civil War. The naming of the thing becomes it's talking point and the talking point becomes the naming of the thing. The paradox of mental understanding.
The spin moves so fast, with 24/7 online news that keeping up with the headlines and news is exhausting and vastly different from my media comparisons when papers were printed and news was a once-a-day wrap-up. Now it is all about the spin of the news of the news and the story about the story becomes more newsworthy and discussed than the original news/story. Example: The Palin/Biden debate was spoofed by SNL's Tina Fey as Palin and Queen Latifa as Moderator Gwen Ifill and it was the latter comedy version that was clipped and played, not the original, for a Meet The Press discussion of the debate. Then, Sunday's version of Meet the Press with Gwen Ifill, three days after the original debate, became a top online yesterday morning with the new spin story in a liberal media outlet about how Ifill couldn't control the debate and how Palin used the podium as a stump speech platform. The latter story generated yet more headlines and attention. By last night the Digg headline Ifill: Palin Blew Me Off was one of the top ranked stories. Any Joe, or Jane Doe can remix Sarah until we forget, really, who she is (or we are just bashed by the onslaught and don't work to find out what she is about) and so, thusly, she (or anyone and anything) becomes iconic and we fragment, culturally, her identity in parsing her to a mere idea or quick image like the symbol of the heart or sun, and she becomes, really, just shorthand - Sarah-in-a-Snippet -.Exact example to make my point: 30-Second Sarah.
No wonder we're tuning out with the tediousness of it all. We work memory in associations and symbols so we subliminally and subconsciously take the blip. 9/11-like. Yet, still, too, I'm hearin' the word ALSO a whole lot more. Or is it just me???? I'm off to capture today's headlines on yesterday's news with more market downturns.
Cheers, also, too.
Related:
The Art and Names of the Global Financial Crisis
U.S. Economic Crisis Media Study
Bigge$st Cri$i$ and Media
Panic, Collapse and Meltdown
