Would you like sugar with that?

Today's Calvin And Hobbes strip reminded me that there is a game you can play when you eat out in America. The concept is really easy but it’s almost impossible to win. The idea is to order your food without the waitress asking you a single question. I had been in America for a couple of weeks but hadn't eaten out much and I wasn’t up to speed on it yet so I approached the counter and asked,
“A coffee and a Bacon Lettuce and Tomato sandwich please.”
Without looking up the waitress asked,
“Wheat, white or rye?”
Nonplussed I paused and when she looked up at the delay I asked for wheat.
She nodded and wrote it down.
“Miracle whip or mayo?”
I was getting the hang of it now and unhesitatingly asked for mayo.
“Toasted or plain?”
“Plain”
“And would you like latte, mocha, espresso or regular?”
Unfazed by the switch to discussing my coffee requirements I went for the Latte.
“Small, regular or large?”
“Large”
“With or without sugar?”
“Without.”
“Cream, milk, non dairy creamer or black?”
“With milk please”.

Clearly I should have asked for ‘an untoasted BLT sandwich on wheat bread with mayonnaise and a large Latte coffee with milk but no sugar.”
If I had then it’s a sure bet that she would have come back with
“Will that be cash or charge?”

(This annecdote can be found in my other blog where I posted my entire unpublished book about my travels in North and South America.)

Palin, Biden and Flesch-Kincaid

A wordcraft regular points to this report which suggests that Sarah Palin "speaks at a higher grade level" than Joe Biden. The source is The Global Language Monitor, whose ludicrous claims that that English language contains (at the time of writing) exactly 997,311 words and will soon be reaching one million, have been ridiculed and debunked by just about every rational person with access to a blog. What then are we to make of their claims in this new, political, forum?

Well, for a start they claim that their calculation is performed by "a modified Flesch-Kincaid formulation". Hmm. That would be the Flesch-Kincaid READABILTY calculation then would it? Let's just say that again, a bit louder, READABILITY. There's a bit of a clue in the name. It's a relatively crude formula for calculating how easy a written text is to read. That's WRITTEN and READ. It's based on the average number of words per sentence and the average number of syllables per word.
Spoken text is a completely different animal. The validity of applying this particular method to spoken text is, to be as charitable as possible, dubious. But they do say "modified", don't they? They don't say how it's been modified (just as they don't say how they go about counting the words in the language) but let's suppose, just for argument's sake, that it's been modified by a magic wand that makes it applicable to speech. There is an even more fatal flaw in using the results to comment on the intelligence or credibility of the candidates. I'll say this nice and loud too, A HIGHER SCORE ISN'T NECESSARILY A BETTER RESULT.
When it comes to what politicians say I like clear, easy to follow concise English. I much prefer it to cunning constructions and clever words. It's much harder to hide a lie in a simple sentence than in a complicated one. What a lower score actually means is that the candidate in question has been more effective at getting his or her message across to more people. It's more accessible. Of course a score of 0 or less would make it comparable with Dr Seuss and nobody wants a(nother) President or Vice-President that talks like a children's book but a moderate score shows only that the speech is aimed correctly at the everyman that a shrewd politician wishes to reach. And what exactly is wrong with that?

(And, for the record, this blog entry has a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 9.6.)