Mavericky grammar, again.

I should stop, but how can I? Especially when I find that none other than the New Yorker's James Wood wrote a piece on Sarah Palin's trouble with words. (I'm a little late on this one.) Here's the relevant section:

“Literary theorists used to say that their most abstruse prose was ‘writing the difficulty’—that the sentences were tortuous because there was no briskly commonsensical way of representing a complex issue. Sarah Palin, alas, talks the difficulty. She may claim, as she did in last Thursday’s Vice-Presidential debate, that ‘Americans are cravin’ that straight talk,’ but they are sure not going to get it from the Governor—not with her peculiar habit of speaking only half a sentence and then moving on to another for spoliation, that strange, ghostly drifting through the haziest phrases, as if she were cruelly condemned to search endlessly for her linguistic home: ‘I do take issue with some of the principle there with that redistribution of wealth principle that seems to be espoused by you.’ And words do matter, after all: it matters that our Vice-Presidential candidate says, as she did to Gwen Ifill, that ‘nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all-end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet.’”

I'll admit that I feel some embarrassment about how much pleasure I take in seeing an eminent literary critic absolutely destroy someone who is probably just trying her best, but I'm basically an “élitist” (to use the New Yorker's diacritic markup), so… yeah.