If a Republican had said it...

Ed Whelan writes:

Judge Sotomayor says "eminent" when she means "imminent," "providence" instead of "province," "story of knowledge" instead of "store of knowledge," and so on. Does the fact that she is a Latina immunize her from attention to that sort of (admittedly not uncommon) foible?

To answer Whelan's question: These malapropisms would only be noteworthy and revealing if they were spoken by a certain country bumpkin Republican governor of Alaska. When a wise Latina accidentally says "vagrancies of ... the moment" instead of "vagaries of ... the moment" during the oral argument of the Ricci case, we're supposed to ignore the slip-up, as the Wall Street Journal did, but make sure to inform readers that they should be impressed by the fact that "The Catholic-school-educated judge clearly knew the Latin plural of 'forum.'"

But enough about her errors of diction. I wouldn't want to get Sotomayor's reputation for writing pieces "that didn't distinguish between substantive and trivial points, with petty editing suggestions--fixing typos and the like--rather than focusing on the core analytical issues."

Update: Allahpundit has the video and a choice Sotomayor quote: "each time I see a split infinitive, an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister."