Earlier in the week, I wrote about Sarah Palin’s insane “baptism via waterboarding” line from her address at the NRA’s “Stand And Fight” rally. Ever since she arrived on the scene in 2008, I’ve been trying to deconstruct her speechwriting style and in my waterboarding post, I think I came pretty damn close to figuring out how best to describe it:
[Palin's] speeches could generously be described as having been dictated into the worst speech-to-text app via an iPhone that was accidentally dropped into a bowl of pudding, then translated into Korean using Google Translate, then translated back into English, then recited by marble-mouthed InfoWars goon Dan Bidoni back into the crappy speech-to-text app, and voilà! A Palin speech.
So for fun I decided to try it using a passage from a very famous political speech, dropping the speech-to-text steps for simplicity’s sake. I copied the most memorable section of President Kennedy’s inaugural address, clicked over to Google Translate, translated it from English to Korean, then I translated the Korean text back into English. And sure enough, a brilliant paragraph had been fully Palin-ized into her special brand of authentic frontier gibberish.
Okay, on with the experiment. I’ve selected several chunks of historical political speeches and processed them through my English-to-Korean-Korean-to-English translation formula. Here now, otherwise well-written historical speeches as if they had been written and delivered by Sarah Palin… READ MORE