I don’t know about you, but I miss Sarah Palin. She’s still around, of course—on Tuesday she guest-hosted the Today show, and I assume she still has the Fox News show where she connects surviving childhood leukemia to free enterprise or whatever. But I miss Sarah Palin the awful thing that happened to American politics. Now that she’s an awful thing that happened to daytime television, my loathing lacks that tang of panic. Not that Sarah Palin is totally useless. She still serves as a valuable warning in both electoral politics and English usage. Lucky for us, she continues to pose as a competent practitioner of both—as she does in the subject of today’s close reading.