September 4, 2008

By dint of their stupidity

I won't get into critiquing Palin's speech, even though it made me think I was listening to an overachieving 11th grader with a Minnesohhta accent run for class president.

I'll just get right to favorite moment from last night's convention coverage. It was during the orgy of useless post-speech interviews, when Keith Olbermann struck a blow for English usage. After a reporter had just interviewed Arizona senator Jon Kyl (a very efficiently spelled name, don't you think?), and the senator said something about proving the "pundints" wrong.

When the reporter tossed it back to Olbermann, he told the viewing audience that there was something he wanted to correct, once and for all, because he was tired of hearing it mispronounced. (The other offender last night - whom Olbermann didn't mention specifically -was Palin.) With fantastically appropriate indignation, Keith said: "It's pundit, p-u-n-d-i-t, not pundint."

Somewhere, one of the Merriam brothers or that Webster guy is smiling.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You would have corrected the speech as well.

JBhumitra said...

im surprised they got it wrong at all. "political pundits" is a really common phrase in the political sphere.

Anonymous said...

I think that's glorious.