Dr. Word discovers the term “Palindrone”

by David Safier
As I was mulling over Palin's wacky press conference announcing her resignation, I came up with what I thought was an original term to describe her speech patterns: Palindrone.

Silly me. Google the term. It's all over the internet, with a variety of meanings. As two words, "Palin drone," it refers to a robotic supporter of the former vice presidential candidate. But I prefer the single word, linguistic reference, Palindrone.

You probably know a palindrome is a phrase that reads the same left to right as right to left. One of the most famous: Able was I, ere I saw Elba. Less famous: Go Hang a Salami, I'm a Lasagna Hog.

A Palindrone, by my definition, is that endless stream of words that pour from Palin's mouth when she speaks without a prepared text. I can't tear myself away when she talks. It's fascinating and irritating at the same time, like prodding a canker sore with your tongue, over and over. I watched parts of yesterday's press conference again and again and again, marveling at the way she strings words together.

The closest I can come to describing Palin's speaking style is this. It's a combination of: (1) a not-too-bright student in one of my classes giving an oral presentation and thinking she will sound smarter if she adds words and phrases she's heard other people say, even though she's not quite sure what they mean or how they fit; and (2) one of those annoying people who can babble endlessly about nothing, seemingly without needing to take a breath, by segueing from topic to topic in an almost stream-of-consciousness flow without concern for logic or continuity.

Here's a short but perfect example:

If you take out the phrases I put in bold face, the sentence is almost coherent. With those phrases, it's pure Palindrone. String a series of sentences like that together and voila! You've got yesterday's press conference.

Palin has elevated this type of speech to a new level of weirdness, but it's as old as politics. e. e. cummings captured it perfectly in his poem, "next to of course god," written in 1926.