Politicos and voters alike were mystified when Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who was born and raised in Illinois and spent two decades living in New York and Washington, D.C., suddenly adopted a Southern twang during a campaign stop in South Carolina. But now, The Daily Caller believes it’s located the cause of the accent shift.
After spending literally minutes poring over Wikipedia, The Daily Caller believes there is a strong possibility Clinton is suffering from Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS). FAS is an extremely rare neurological disorder “in which patients develop what appears to be a foreign accent.”
Wikipedia gives an example that sounds eerily similar to the episode Clinton suffered Wednesday: “an American native speaker of English might sound as though he spoke with a south-eastern English accent, or a native English speaker might speak with a New York American accent.”
The causes of FAS include a strokes, head trauma, migraines or developmental problems. As was widely reported in 2012, Clinton suffered a concussion after a fall and later needed treatment for a blood clot in her head. Could this trauma be the source of Clinton’s FAS?
The alternative to this theory is that Hillary Clinton, a respected politician with years of public service, was putting on some sort of fake accent to cynically endear herself to Southern voters, and that she believes Southerners are so ignorant they would fall for such an obvious ploy. That was clearly not the case.
Since 1941, there have been only 62 recorded cases of FAS. The most recently reported case was then-Senator Barack Obama, whose dialect coincidentally shifted while giving a speech to a predominantly black audience. Even Delaware-native Joe Biden suddenly threw in a “y’all” when delicately informing a black audience that Republicans would put them back in chains.