YouTube - Miss Teen USA 2007 - South Carolina answers a question Miss Teen USA 2007 - Ms. South Carolina answers a question

It is all too easy to make fun of speakers like this. But most commenters on YouTube (and elsewhere) got it wrong.

ChrisKangaroo It is obviuos that she has no idea what a map is and therefore, she is unable to answer

Or rather, like the speaker above applied the less apt folk theory of linguistic coherence. I.e. things have to make sense. This folk theory got a lot of play around the internets including http://mapsforus.org, the Tube map, and BoingB oing's transcription of it into verse.

A much more balanced view including a transcript (reformatted here from the original verse) was provided by an anonymous commenter on BoingBoing:

"I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some... People out there in our nation don't have maps, and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and the Iraq ... everywhere like "such as"... and I believe that they should our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for us."

…

My translation/explanation:

I believe when she started to answer the question, she knew what the question was asking, but probably second-guessed herself into thinking it was more likely that it stated that people from other nations couldn’t locate the U.S. on a map. Thus, she switched her answer around to match that train of thought, concluding that those people couldn’t locate the U.S. on a map primarily because they simply lack maps, and secondarily because they lack proper education, which the U.S. should assist with.

I suspect that Anonymous got it just about right. However, there’s more of the story to be told. Her speech is marked by a constant search for coherence and the possible cohesive links just come too fast for her to process them in a very stressful situation. She is basically trying to integrate a question with several publicly available frames. But these frames come with linguistic structures attached to them and these structures can be reminiscent of other structures that then evoke other (possibly different) framings. (I’m just now playing with the notion of frames as constructions - just gave a talk at NDCL 2 on this topic).

The speaker is using stock phrases (more than likely as a result of explicit training) such as “I personally believe” and more open ended constructions such as “should help” and “out education” that can be integrated with very many constructional clichés of the public political discourse. That is what set her off on the path of the US helping others even though she started with the frame of the US needing help. But every intonation unit of her speech is rife with the quest for coherence. She uses all the right devices to establish it both internally and externally but ultimately fails.

Of course, discursively and intellectually the situation is completely corrupt. The questioner doesn’t give her any space to negotiate the conceptual and linguistic space. The problem with the ridicule isn’t just the picking on the helpless (others can probably do better) but the linguistic and cognitive naivety of the taunters. This speech says nothing about the intelligence of the woman nor her ability to address this issue. It was simply the best she could do in that situation. This should remind us of the fragility of language and cognition.

But having said that, this Quiet Library video is very funny (or at least the first part):