There are a dozen theories to explain Sarah Palin, and all of them make some sense.
I am neither a Palin supporter nor a Palin critic, but from my wireless cave in Taiwan I have been observing her speeches and live interviews via the Internet, and I think I've come up with yet another theory to explain, sort of, Sarah Palin, and it's an 11-letter word: ''dysfluency''.
Yes, in my amateur status as a speech therapist who suffered my own speech problems as a 5-year-old kid in 1950s western Massachusetts (I had to visit a speech therapist for a year), my sensitivities are with Sarah Palin as I wrote this post.
I believe the reason her live, unscripted interviews and speeches sound so dysfluent sometimes is because she suffers from what speech therapists I have been in touch with call "dysfluency."
It even has a scientific name, among therapists and medical practioners.
One expert on speech and language disorders, but who is not a medical doctor, told me when I queried him on this:
"Although I think it's fair to say that during interviews (that is, in unscripted speech) Palin has sometimes exhibited dysfluency (a general term for speech that isn't smoothly delivered or grammatically well formed), I'm not qualified to judge whether she suffers from a chronic speech disorder. ('Anacoluthon', the medical word for this, by the way, is not usually considered a chronic disorder; rather, it's an occasional practice that some people may all fall into — especially in times of stress.) For a credible diagnosis of Palin's speech patterns, you really should consult with a professional speech-language pathologist."
I think that Palin's dysfluency in speech, (not in writing, but in speech only — unscripted speech especially), stems from this kind of dysflency syndrome.
I hesitate to call it a disorder, since I am not a doctor (just the son of a doctor, who turned into an acute, and sometimes chronic, observer of life and people).
I have asked several top reporters at major newspapers to look into this, and not one has responded. Still, I think that as time goes on we will learn that just as some people suffer from dyslexia when trying to read, others suffer from dysfluency when trying to talk.
It's nothing to be ashamed of, and it's nothing to mock or make fun of. It's a real medical issue, and it needs to be discussed in the open, without fear or favor.
Does Palin suffer from dysfluency? I do not know. But if you look at some her published transcripts of interviews and un-rehearsed live speeches, you can see how she sometimes puts her words in an order than defies logic, or grammar.
So speech therapists of the world: dish!
Does Sarah Palin suffer from dysfluency of speech, and could this help explain how she sometimes wrestles the English language to kingdom come?
Or is there a better explanation? If so, I haven't seen it.
