It’s a week for Obama-bashing. Nothing new there, but now a pseudo-linguist is trying to linguify the sport. Paul Payack is the guy in charge of the Global Language Monitor, a group which serves mostly to promote bogus claims about language. This time, Payack is carping about Obama’s Oval Office address. He says it’s far too professorial at an impenetrable 9.8 grade level. Also, it’s ‘aloof’ and ‘out of touch’.

Mark Liberman comments:

I think we can all agree that those are shockingly long professor-style sentences for a president to be using, especially in addressing the nation after a disaster. Why, they were almost as long as the ones that President George W. Bush, that notorious pointy-headed intellectual, used in his 9/15/2005 speech to the nation about Hurricane Katrina, where I count 3283 words in 140 sentences, for an average of 23.45 words per sentence! And we all remember how upset the press corps got about the professorial character of that speech!

Payack’s critique appeared in this CNN article.

Though the president used slightly less than four sentences per paragraph, his 19.8 words per sentence “added some difficulty for his target audience,” Payack said.

He singled out this sentence from Obama as unfortunate: “That is why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge — a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s secretary of energy.”

Did that sentence stump you? If it did, it’s not your fault — blame Obama.

In fact, why not blame Obama for everything? That’s the strategy employed here by Sarah Palin, whose sentences could never be described as ‘professorial’, though one could say ‘aphasic’.

I get through about 13 seconds of this before I get a strong desire to cram her down an oil pipe (along with her three-legged stool), which may just be worth trying. I’m amazed at her ability to criticise someone who’s actually working on the problem. Remember how she used to say “Drill, baby, drill” not too long ago? For some reason, not so much anymore.

I can only imagine what the extent of the disaster would have been if the GOP clowns had won the election. More drilling, plus even less regulatory oversight.

John Cole takes up the theme:

All I know is that if Obama doesn’t stop the oil leak with his massive Kenyan penis and then give a rousing FDR/Trumanesque speech delivered using a grade 7.5 language level that gives Chris Matthews a blue-vein hard-on and then personally scrubs every drop of oil from the gulf without hurting BP’s profits and making sure every oil worker has a job, I’m out. I mean, come on. That isn’t asking too much, is it? And why don’t we have gay marriage and a cure for cancer? What a loser!

Yeah, because saving the economy and passing health care is so last year.