Reading or listening

John McWhorter writing for TNR.com:

"Why does Sarah Palin talk the way she does? . . . [She] is given to meandering phraseology of a kind suggesting someone more commenting on impressions as they enter and leave her head rather than constructing insights about them. . . .

The easy score is to flag this speech style as a sign of moronism. But we have to be careful—there is a glass houses issue here. Before parsing Palinspeak we have to understand the worldwide difference between spoken and written language—and the fact that in highly literate societies, we tend to have idealized visions of how close our speech supposedly is to the written ideal.

"Namely, linguists have shown that spoken utterances—even by educated people (that is, even you)—average seven to ten words. We speak in little packets. And the result is much baggier than we think of language as being, because we live under the artificial circumstance of engaging language so much on the page, artificially enshrined, embellished, and planned out."