A rule in column writing, which is also applicable to almost any other sort including blogging, is that there is really nothing worse than insincerity in your writing. Insincere outrage is doubly shameful.
Exhibit A: the newest right-wing attack on Sonia Sotomayor, and a clear indication that they are running out of creativity, centers around her use of the Spanish language. Sotomayor has been known as a stickler for proper grammar, meaning she would probably cringe if this blog she came upon. (Yep, I ended on that).
She’s on record saying:
“Go back and read a couple of basic grammar books. Most people never go back to basic principles of grammar after their first six years in elementary school. Each time I see a split infinitive, an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister.”
So when she said the following statement, seemingly going against her passion for proper sentence-crafting, this of course affected some people’s delicate sensibilities:
“When my first mid-term paper came back to me my first semester, I found out that my Latina background had created difficulties in my writing that I needed to overcome. For example, in Spanish, we do not have adjectives. A noun is described with a preposition, a cotton shirt in Spanish is a shirt of cotton, una camisa de agodon, no agondon camisa.”
This has caused a bit of an uproar. From a National Review Online blog:
The proposition that “in Spanish, we do not have adjectives” is risible in the extreme. I haven’t counted them, but surely the language has literally thousands of them. The current (i.e. 22nd) edition of the Dictionary of the Spanish Language (“Diccionario de la Lengua Española”), of the Royal Spanish Academy (“Real Academia Española”) — i.e., the official dictionary of the Spanish language — offers many classifications (with examples) of Spanish-language adjectives under the term ‘adjetivo.”
And from Discriminations:
Excuse me, but after all that self-taught grammar, etc., could 1976 Princeton summa Sonia Sotomayor really still believe, in 1996, that “in Spanish we do not have adjectives. A noun is described with a preposition”?
The blogger actually goes on to give Sotomayor a lesson in Spanish adjectives. Queeeeee?
If this outrage is to be taken seriously (quite a magic trick), it fails as an argument. It’s clear that she was not really saying there are NO adjectives in the Spanish language, but that they are used differently. As a native Spanish speaker, I will second her statement.
If this point of contention catches fire, it strengthens a damaging possibility: the right-wing has thrown in the towel on Sotomayor. With no serious argument to make against her confirmation on the eve of the formal process, they have essentially given up and decided to nit pick at her, hoping she will enter the Court weathered and weak.
At the very least, this is another example of the Republican party finding its most prominent mouthpieces oustide of the party. They continue to be without a partisan leader, as a recent USA Today poll showed, and rely on having talking points fed to them by propagandists and bloggers.
What if this outrage is actually sincere?
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Tags: gop · sonia sotomayor3 Comments
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