According to a group of pedantic poo-bahs, Governor Palin “…spoke at a more than ninth-grade level and Sen. Joseph Biden spoke at a nearly eighth-grade level in Thursday night’s debate between the vice presidential candidates.”
The same group that rated her comments at a grade level of 9.5 and Biden’s at a grade level of 7.8 also put her penultimate sentence “at a grade level of 18.3” (several “grade levels” shy of the reading level of the inhabitants of twc central*–and yeh, the CNN report did NOT use the word “penultimate,” choosing instead the awkward, dumbed down and wordier, “second-to-last” formulation… no doubt in recognition of the subliteracy of CNN’s usual readership/viewership. Either that or the writer didn’t know the word “penultimate”–another distinct possibility).
Oh, *yawn* Put Academia Nut Fruitcakes and Mass Media Podpeople together and this is what usually results: stupid yammering.
*I strive to rein in my tendency to use complex or even obscurantist syntax, as well as useful vocabulary, but it’s not easy, and I’m not always successful. In fact, I had professors complain about the density of my prose from time to time. Let ’em eat cake. Grad school was fun, in part, because there were fewer complaints about my vocabulary. In long, long ago days of yore, when I sometimes played teacher in a pubschool classroom, junior high kids used to complain about my word usage. I told ’em to get a dictionary and have someone look up the words they didn’t know for them. Heck, I gave an assistant principal a word list one time, out of the kindness of my heart. Most high school kids already knew better than to complain, since they knew what I’d say in reply. *heh*