Conservatives Are Afraid Of People Speaking Other Languages

1969- somehow we wound up as guests at a wedding, somewhere in Morocco. I'm the nerd with the big stoned smile and the embroidery on my pants cuffs

So there I was-- 1969, Hippie Trail, headed for India in my VW van. We were in eastern Turkey getting read to cross the border into Iran the next day. We were: me, the only American on board, a French guy, two Danes and a German. There was another van going in the other direction parked with us, driven by an Australian and he had another Aussie with him as well as a couple of Japanese kids, a Flemish-speaking Belgian and a guy from Chile. Getting ready for crossing a border meant smoking up all the dope everyone had; no dope allowed at border crossings. So we sat around getting stoned and exchanging stories about what was ahead and behind.

I was really high when I suddenly realized how lucky I was. The Danish girl and the Japanese girl were having a side conversation near me and it was in English. Everyone was talking English. That was the language of the road. It was the common language of travelers. I spent a couple of years in Asia and I could get along with English almost everywhere. In Afghanistan I wound up way off the beaten path in a tiny "village" (2 compounds) in the Hindu Kush. No one spoke English. They didn't even speak Farsi (Persian) or Dari (the local Afghan version of Farsi). No one had ever experienced electricity or had heard of the United States. Since I was on horseback with a broken ankle and snowed in for the winter, I was forced to learn Pashtun. But... otherwise, English worked everywhere.

A few years later I was working at the Kosmos, Amsterdam's mediation center. It was a city-subsidized international youth center and there were people from all over the world, as staff and as clients. But English was the "official" language of the Kosmos. Many of the Dutch staffers were not happy about that, bit everyone knew that's the way it had to be. Outside of work they refused to respond to English and would only speak Dutch. These were my closest friends. They forced me to learn Dutch. The only one who would talk English with me was Evelyne, a French-Dutch artist, but she preferred Dutch too. It was good for me, although... right around the time Nixon was being impeached I woke up one morning and realized I had been dreaming in Dutch, not English. I didn't like that. I started thinking about moving back to the U.S. at that point, which I eventually did.

But while I was living overseas I realized that the only people uncomfortable with hearing foreign languages were Americans. Canadians weren't. Nor were Brits or Aussies or South Africans. Just Americans. When you're stoned you get sensitive to that kind of thing and can recognize it. I came to understand that Americans are so unused to hearing foreign languages that they-- or more accurately some of them-- get paranoid and assume that the people speaking another language are saying something nasty about them-- anything from, "Oh, what a asshole" to "Let's cut him up in a thousand pieces and dump the pieces all over Herat in a pattern."

You sometimes can detect that kind of paranoia here in the states when people are speaking Spanish. Some people just bristle. According to Pew Research, those people are conservatives. That's who who gets up tight and paranoid about a foreign language. I knew that instinctively but it was interesting to see it as part of their study.

About three-in-ten Americans say it would bother them to hear people speak a language other than English in public

Most Americans (70%) say they would not be particularly bothered if they heard people speak a language other than English in a public place, including 47% who say they would not be bothered at all. Still, a sizable share (29%) says this would bother them at least some.

Roughly a third of whites (34%) and about a quarter of blacks (24%) and Asians (24%) say they would be bothered if they heard people speak a language other than English in public; a smaller share of Hispanics (14%) say the same. About two-thirds of Hispanics (68%) say this wouldn’t bother them at all, compared with half or fewer whites (41%), blacks (48%) and Asians (50%). Foreign-born Hispanics are more likely than those born in the U.S. to say they would not be bothered at all if they heard someone speak a language other than English in public (76% vs. 61%).

Among whites, reactions vary considerably by age, education and political orientation. Younger whites and those with a bachelor’s degree or more education are less likely than their older and less educated counterparts to say they would be bothered by hearing a language other than English in a public place.

Views are even more divided along partisan lines. About six-in-ten white Democrats (58%)-- vs. 26% of white Republicans-- say this wouldn’t bother them at all.

The part of this that I keep mulling over is that 47% of white Republicans said it would bother them "some" or "a lot" to "hear people speak a language other than English in a public place." Interestingly Pew found that only 18% of white Democrats would be bothered. What does that tell you about the people attracted to the two parties?

Ever Noice That Señor Trumpanzee Talks Funny?

While Democrats and Republicans were finding a compromise to keep the government open, the asshole in the Oval Office tried blowing up the negotiations by saying he wants a shut down over immigrants so he can blame it on the Democrats. He's undoubtably the worst monster this country has ever been saddled with. Because resident DWT psychological expert, Helen Klein, is on vacation, We looked at an OpEd by author and linguist John McWhorter, What Trump's Speech Says About His Mental Fitness.

As part of the discussion about Donald Trump’s lack of fitness for the presidency, some have argued that his linguistic capacities have worsened, suggesting significant cognitive decline.

In interviews in the 1980s and 1990s, Mr. Trump speaks in complete sentences, using mature vocabulary and expressions. There aren’t the endless digressions that make his current mode of expression a kind of vocal fantasia. America has certainly never experienced a commander in chief who expressed himself in this fashion. In public, at least.

However, the distinction between public and private speech is key here, so I am unconvinced that his current speech patterns can be analyzed as evidence of dementia. Instead, they’re characteristics of casual speech as it has always existed.

It is easy to forget how much casual speech in general differs from writing. We tend to imagine our speech is tidier than it often is. The complete sentences and logical throughlines of writing are a stylization of speech, rather than a mirror image.

Take this famous Trump utterance from July 2015.

Look, having nuclear-- my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at M.I.T.; good genes, very good genes, O.K., very smart, the Wharton School of finance, very good, very smart-- you know, if you're a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, O.K., if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world-- it’s true!-- but when you're a conservative Republican they try-- oh, they do a number-- that’s why I always start off: "Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune”-- you know I have to give my life credentials all the time, because we're a little disadvantaged-- but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me …

Real speech comes, on average, in packets of 10 or so words at a time, rather sloppily juxtaposed. Rapid, spontaneous talk makes more use of parataxis – the stringing of simple clauses together, such as in this segment in bold type:

Look, having nuclear-- my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at M.I.T.; good genes, very good genes, O.K., very smart, the Wharton School of finance, very good, very smart-- you know, if you're a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, okay, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world-- it’s true!-- but when you're a conservative Republican they try-- oh, they do a number-- that’s why I always start off: "Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune”-- you know I have to give my life credentials all the time, because we're a little disadvantaged-- but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me …

In writing, this would likely be rendered using hypotaxis, which entails clearer subordinate clauses. The same sentence would be written as: “My uncle Dr. John Trump, who was a professor at M.I.T., had very good genes, which lent him considerable intelligence.”

Real speech tends to be fundamentally subjective rather than objective, and is therefore decorated with what linguists call pragmatic words and constructions, expressing attitude rather than content:

Look, having nuclear-- my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at M.I.T.; good genes, very good genes, O.K., very smart, the Wharton School of finance, very good, very smart-- you know, if you're a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, O.K., if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world-- it’s true!-- but when you're a conservative Republican they try-- oh, they do a number-- that’s why I always start off: "Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune”-- you know I have to give my life credentials all the time, because we're a little disadvantaged-- but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me …

Mr. Trump also turns the lens in on himself when he switches from “you” to “I” within the passage, another indication of the fundamentally subjective nature of casual speech, even if his ample use of it suggests an especially strong focus upon the self.

Look, having nuclear-- my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at M.I.T.; good genes, very good genes, O.K., very smart, the Wharton School of finance, very good, very smart-- you know, if you're a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, O.K., if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world-- it’s true!-- but when you're a conservative Republican they try-- oh, they do a number-- that’s why I always start off: "Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune”-- you know I have to give my life credentials all the time, because we're a little disadvantaged-- but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me …

Casual speech tends towards the repetitious, as we seek to indicate sincerity and make sure our meaning has gotten across. Mr. Trump, because he speaks casually, does a lot of repeating.

Look, having nuclear-- my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at M.I.T.; good genes, very good genes, O.K., very smart, the Wharton School of finance, very good, very smart-- you know, if you're a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, O.K., if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world-- it’s true!-- but when you're a conservative Republican they try-- oh, they do a number-- that’s why I always start off: "Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune”-- you know I have to give my life credentials all the time, because we're a little disadvantaged-- but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me …

This passage also has a kind of coherence. Mr. Trump starts out addressing the nuclear deal with Iran, but then interjects some insights about his elevated qualifications for discussing the subject and his resentment of a purportedly biased media that forces him to mention them-- and then he does get back to the nuclear subject. Elegant? No, but not demented, either. Facial expression and context, which print obscures, made Mr. Trump’s meaning clear.

Two and three decades ago, Mr. Trump spoke to David Letterman and Rona Barrett in the quietly composed phrasing we expect of public figures expressing serious thoughts. So why does the same man now toss off word salad?

Because he can.

The younger Mr. Trump, albeit as self-obsessed as now, was not yet a rock star, and he had a businessman’s normal inclination to present himself in as polished a manner as possible in public settings. Especially as someone who grew up in the 1950s, when old-school standards of oratory were still part of the warp and woof of American linguistic culture, Mr. Trump instinctually talked "up" when the cameras were rolling. To him, cloaking his speech in its Sunday best would have been part of, as it were, being a gentleman.

However, for him this would always have been more stunt than essence. Since he is someone who neither reads nor reflects, his linguistic comfort zone has always been the unadorned.

At a certain point, Mr. Trump became the man who felt-- and was comfortable saying publicly-- that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and retain his supporters' allegiance. Someone with that mind-set, especially a sybaritic person unaccustomed to sustained effort, has no impetus to speak in a way unnatural to him in public.

Mr. Trump is equally unmoved by any sense that to speak as a president is a kind of kabuki or performance art, in which one doesn’t so much talk as signal. He has learned that he can just show up and run his mouth, and he’ll be adored regardless.

Some suppose Mr. Trump started talking down deliberately in order to portray folksiness. But this imputes to him a sociological sensitivity, a reflective, outwardly focused theory of mind, that he shows no evidence of otherwise. More likely, Mr. Trump has simply taken the path of least resistance.

Note, for example, another difference between the younger Mr. Trump and today’s: comfort. In those old interviews he is a more buttoned-up person, obviously somewhat wary of the eyes upon him. Now, he revels in the attention as if he’s the paterfamilias at the head of a Thanksgiving dinner table. The articulate Mr. Trump of yore was wearing a linguistic tuxedo; today’s swivel-tongued Mr. Trump is in a linguistic track suit.

The difference between the younger man talking in sentences and the older one talking in vocal ejaculations is evidence not of decline but authenticity – he has settled into his normal. Late in life an artless man has learned that he could leave his linguistic fly unzipped and life would go on. It may not be pretty, but it isn't a sign that his pants are going to fall down.

Do native Americans speak with an accent? Yes, but most of us don't know what they are, including our own

Stephen Colbert challenges Michelle Dockery, Hugh Bonneville, and Allen Leech to read a Downton Abbey scene in American accents. Stephen's own idea about American accents could use some touching up, it seems.

"Nationally, most Americans don’t really know that much about the people who live in [Colorado, Wyoming, or Nebraska], which means we also haven’t constructed elaborate and unreliable legends about the ways people in those states speak. And because the way we see people is the primary factor in the way we hear them speak, if we don’t know much about a population? We don’t hear much of an accent, either."

-- Dan Nosowitz, in "Is There a Place in America Where
People Speak Without Accents?," for Atlas Obscura

by Ken

Though Howie and I go back together to the ninth grade at the James Maddison High School annex, we go back together only that far, because I'm not a native New Yorker. When we moved here in 1961, many of the Brooklynites I now lived among were puzzled by my accent, which had been concocted through seven years in my native Baltimore and five years in the Midwest bastion of Milwaukee, where the kids I went to school with made fun of my "Southern accent." In Brooklyn especially, having what might be called "Midwestern speech" was interesting, because as I came to learn, Midwestern speech is the basis for what had come to be known as "General American" speech -- the sort of thing favored by the people who hired newscasters and other on-air personalities they hoped would sound "un-accented."

Only now it turns out that "General American" speech was itself mythologicall Oh, it might have described a cauldron of speech patterns, among which the "General American" speakers may well have tended to employ a few. But it doesn't seem likely that there was ever anywhere where the locals generally spoke "General American," and even in the areas where it was thought to be spoken, it isn't anymore -- there have been major shifts in the speech patterns of the whole presumed-"General American" belt since John Kenyon "laid out some linguistic and geographical guidelines for General American," which he claimed was spoken by 90 million Americans, in his 1930 book, American Pronunciation, as Dan Nosowitz reports for Atlas Obscura in a piece called, "Is There a Place in America Where People Speak Without Accents?"

Dan draws inspiration and courage in debunking the whole concept of General American from Oklahoma State University dialectologist and sociolinguist Dennis Preston, who says, "General American doesn't exist. He was demoted to private or sergeant a long, long time ago."

But the concept persists: we believe that, for example, newscasters, maybe some actors, and certainly some people, somewhere, speak an unaccented variety of American English. For instance, when Stephen Colbert explained his vocal patterns to 60 Minutes, he said:

"At a very young age, I decided I was not gonna have a Southern accent. Because people, when I was a kid watching TV, if you wanted to use a shorthand that someone was stupid, you gave the character a Southern accent. And that's not true. Southern people are not stupid. But I didn't wanna seem stupid. I wanted to seem smart. And so I thought, 'Well, you can't tell where newsmen are from.’"

The name of this accentless accent varies; sometimes it’s called Standard American, or Broadcast English, or Network English, or, as it was created by two independent linguists in the 1920s and 1930s, General American. It is a neutral accent, one without distinguishing features.

But where does General American come from? Is there a place where people, young and old, speak like newscasters?

I expect it won't surprise you to learn that, while Dan has an answer of sorts for the first question, his answer to the second is a resounding "no." It turns out that John Kenyon's General American was based on the speech he tended to hear from the speakers he was most familiar with growing up in Northeastern Ohio. It seems most unlikely that even then it was the "standard" speech of the area, and as noted above, since Kenyon's time, "The entire vowel system of the parts of the country along the Great Lakes, stretching from New York cities like Rochester and Buffalo straight through to Chicago and Detroit, began to dramatically change," in what came to be known to linguists as the "Northern Cities Vowel Shift."

You can check out for yourself some of the specifics, but the key point is that, "within the linguistic community, the idea that General American had any relation to any actual geographical place was quickly destroyed."

The field of American linguistics advanced very quickly in the mid-20th century, and by 1950 numerous studies were released that found that even within Northeastern Ohio, there were multiple distinctive accents and dialects, and that certainly Kenyon’s rules for General American did not apply to the vast part of the country he claimed. The Northern Cities Vowel Shift work further combusted any idea that General American described the way people talk in the Midwest.

In this more sophisticated understanding of American "accents," researchers like Dennis Preston have concluded that Americans (a) mostly think they themselves don't have an accent, except for some specific regions like the South, in part because (b) Americans are pretty terrible at recognizing accents, their own or anybody else's. Ironically, for example, "Midwesterners tend to not actually hear the very things that distinguish them to the rest of the country." Again, go to the source for some description of the kinds of things Dan is talking about, including some video clips of broadcasters speaking anything like a standardized "accentless" American.

One thing broadcasters frequently do do, though, is to enunciate with great care, which apparently is easily mistaken as "accentless" speech by hearers who aren't good to begin with at recognizing most American accents, which Dan assures us do exist, in every locality in the country. In the end, he says,

the search for an accent-less accent is more about our own perception and lack of understanding of linguistics than any objective, observable pattern. In other words, we are hearing what we want to hear, not what people are actually saying.

Hmm. "We are hearing what we want to hear, not what people are actually saying." Nothing surprising about that, is there?

#

Is Trump Really Getting A Concise, Definitive Message Out To Voters... Beyond Just, "I'm A Racist?"

Not having ever watched an episode of Trump's TV sit-com, I started examining his 4th grade vocabulary and his manipulative/infantile way of addressing audiences last year. During the Republican debates he understood the audience better than his opponents and spoke at a 3rd or 4th grade level, according to the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test. His comments from an August 11 news conference in Michigan earned only a 3rd-grade score.

Flattening the English language whenever he speaks without a script, Trump relies heavily on words such as “very” and “great,” and the pronouns “we” and “I,” which is his favorite word. As any news observer can observe, he lives to diminish his foes by calling them “losers,” “total losers,” “haters,” “dumb,” “idiots,” “morons,” “stupid,” “dummy” and “ disgusting.” He can’t open his mouth without bragging about getting the Clintons to attend his wedding, about how smart he is, the excellence of his real estate projects, the brilliance of his TV show, his generous donations to other political campaigns and so on. In a freakish way, Trump resembles that of Muhammad Ali at his prime-- except the champ was always kidding (even when he was right) while Trump seems to believe his claims (and often is wrong). Or perhaps he is afflicted with binary vision disorder, which renders all within his eyeshot either great or rotten.

It’s obvious that Trump’s verbal deficit, as grating as it may be on the ears of the educated class, has not caused him much political pain. The media has noted the opposite: Trump’s overreliance on sports and war metaphors in his public utterances, his reductionist, one-dimensional policy prescriptions-- including nuanced geopolitical arguments such as get tough with China and Mexico, which are killing us!-- inspire trust in many rather than distrust. Trump’s rejection of “convoluted nuance” and “politically correct norms,” mark him as authentic in certain corners and advance his cred as a plainspoken guardian of the American way. By not conforming to the standard oratorical style, he distinguishes himself from the pompous politician. Less is more when you’re speaking Trumpspeak.

Wednesday, right-wing journalist Byron York, writing for the right-wing website, Washington Examiner examined how Trump speaks for his right-wing audience. Right-wing operatives were flabbergasted by Trump's crazy, rambling hour-plus stand-up routine in Cincinnati Wednesday. Rory Cooper, one of the Eric Cantor aides who never quite got what Cantor was facing, seemed exasperated: "We shouldn't be talking about anything but Clinton's flagrant abuse of classified info but Trump wants to exercise his right to word vomit."

Any hostility to Trump aside, there appears to be a serious disconnect, a communications gap, between those who cover and comment on Trump and those who support him and come to his rallies. Trump is simply so far outside the conventions of political oratory that his style is sometimes hard for political professionals to grasp.

The first thing to remember is that Trump does not give a speech in the sense that veteran political strategists or reporters recognize and understand a speech. From the very beginning of his campaign, Trump has expressed contempt for the entire genre of political speechmaking.

Speaking at a giant rally in Dallas last September, Trump started off by noting that he wasn't using a teleprompter. "That would be so much easier," he said. "We read a speech for 45 minutes. Everybody falls asleep, listening to the same old stuff, the same old lies. So much easier."

On many other occasions-- at rallies, debates, other appearances-- Trump has expressed a fear of boring his audience, of putting everyone to sleep. He is determined not to do that.

Instead of a prepared stump speech that he gives over and over again-- the standard diet for political reporters covering the presidential race-- Trump instead has chosen to deliver a stream of consciousness performance designed to capitalize on his celebrity, to entertain, to attack opponents, and to address the actual issues in the race. And most of all, to keep his audience awake and paying attention.

Trump wanders all over the lot. In any given speech, he will talk about his businesses, his golf courses, his friends, his TV ratings, his children, all the Republicans he has defeated in primaries, the club championships he has won, and much, much more. (Trump used to talk incessantly about polls when he was leading the GOP race; now, not so much.) He will talk about anything that comes to mind. This goes on for 10, 20, 30, 45 minutes, and often more than an hour.

There's a lot of bragging in Trump's speeches. He can seem strangely needy, repeatedly asking the audience to affirm that he did a good job with this or that. But mostly he's telling voters how great he is, how everything he does and everything he possesses is the best, and how he will be a great, great president.

It's all part of the show. As Rush Limbaugh, who probably understands Trump as well as anybody, has pointed out (in what Limbaugh called a "Trump Shtick Explainer") Trump "knows he's putting everybody on, and the trick is that he knows his audience knows." It's all part of the performance, and amid all the bombast, Trump makes it a practice on two or three occasions, in Limbaugh's words, "to go all humble, go total humility." He tells people he's honored to be in their presence even as he dwells at great length on his own wonderfulness. People aren't offended by the bragging because they sense it's part of the act, and they appreciate the occasional touch of humility. Trump almost never expresses a complete thought without going down some side road.

...Trump devotes an enormous amount of time in each speech to bashing the media. They're liars, dishonest, the worst sort of people. In Cincinnati, he spent about four and a half minutes defending himself on his infamous Star of David tweet, but the defense was almost an entirely an attack on the journalists who were making a big deal of it.

Trump also spent a lot of time in Cincinnati re-telling the story of his recent trip to Turnberry, his golf course in Scotland, and all the media flak he took for it. He went on and on complaining about his treatment, arguing that he only took the trip to show support for his son Eric, who had restored the famous golf resort.

Why does Trump think the audience wants to hear that stuff? In part, he is playing on the crowd's antipathy to the media, which is strong. But he's also playing to the public's appetite for celebrity gossip. When Trump talks about his plane and his golf courses and his oceanfront estate, there's a good chance the audience is interested for the same reason that it reads stories like "Matt Lauer buys Richard Gere's $36 million Hamptons compound" (to cite a recent headline from the New York Post). A lot of people like to hear about celebrities and their high-flying lifestyles.

Occasionally Trump's detours get him into trouble. Near the end of May, at a speech in San Diego, Trump went off on a ten-minute rant about the Trump University lawsuit. He discussed the plaintiffs by name. He offered his assessment of various law firms. He analyzed the question of summary judgment. And in the course of all that, he said, "So what happens is the judge, who happens to be, we believe, Mexican..." With that, Trump was off to the races for another controversy that consumed his campaign for many days.

Still, amid it all, Trump manages to cover some of the bases of a conventional political speech. In Cincinnati, he devoted the first part of the speech to attacking Hillary Clinton in light of the Obama Justice Department's decision not to charge her in the email affair.

"I just heard the news, because it just happened, with the Attorney General of the United States saying no problem, no problem," Trump began. "You know, I wrote out a couple of things about Hillary, Crooked Hillary, crooked, so crooked. She made so many false statements." Trump proceeded to go through Clinton's lies about why she had a secret email system, about the tens of thousands of emails she erased, about the emails she turned over to the State Department, about her handling of classified material, about the the security of her private server.

"Rigged system, folks," Trump concluded.

The Hillary section was the longest single part of Trump's speech, not counting the several times he returned to her later. And yet, even with that juicy material, Trump the showman was still worried about putting the audience to sleep. "There are many," he said of the particulars against Hillary Clinton, "I just don't want to bore you with too many of these things."

Describing an interview on Meet the Press, Trump suggested the audience doesn't want to be overloaded with any one thing. "[Meet the Press] wanted me to talk about Hillary for hours," Trump explained. "Hours. Fifteen minutes-- she's Crooked Hillary, that's all you have to know, she's crooked as hell."

Trump interspersed issues throughout the Cincinnati speech. As always, he never discussed specifics of how he would handle any given issue, choosing instead to talk in terms of goals. When he said, for example, that he would keep the air conditioner company Carrier from moving its operations to Mexico, or at least make Carrier pay a heavy price for leaving, he was doing what Limbaugh described when he said, "This is the way Trump telegraphs his preferences and his support for people." Anyone looking for details will be frustrated.

All the while, Trump told the audience he wants to talk more about issues, but the press is too focused on extraneous controversies to focus on what he discusses. Describing his speech the night before, Trump said, "We talked about terrorism. We talked about trade. We talked about terminating Obamacare and replacing it with something great, which we're going to do, too. We talked about getting rid of Common Core and bringing our education locally and taking it away from Washington. We talked about borders. We talked about building a wall, right? We talked about our depleted military, right?"

So what do the voters get from Trump's act? That depends on whether they are inside the room or out. Trump still draws big crowds-- bigger than any of his Republican rivals and now, bigger than Hillary Clinton. In Cincinnati, he drew a reported 7,000. (Trump is competitive in the key swing state of Ohio, trailing Clinton by 2.5 points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls, which is almost precisely the margin-- 2.6 points-- by which Mitt Romney trailed Barack Obama at the same time in 2012.)

But of course, while drawing 7,000 on a Wednesday night in Cincinnati is good, it's nothing compared to the 62 million Americans Trump will need to vote for him if he is to win the White House.

In the room, Trump has devoted followers who hang on every word, while others have come mostly to see what all the fuss is about. Of the latter group, it's not at all unusual to see people head for the exits when Trump hits the 30 or 40 minute mark. Ask them why they're leaving, and they usually say they have to be at work in the morning.

But here's the striking thing, whether the attendee is a loyal Trump fan or not: After all of Trump's rambling and meandering, after one discursive aside after another, many of those attending still manage to come away from Trump's speech with concise and focused takeaways. Asked what Trump is going to do, they'll say: He's going to build a wall, he's going to bring our jobs back, and he's going to knock the hell out of ISIS. Somehow, in long and winding performance, Trump got his message across.

He communicates in a way far different from what the political world is used to-- but he communicates.

The (far) bigger question is those 62 million voters. What do they hear? Mostly they hear what journalists want them to hear, if they're even listening to that. And in Cincinnati, the media message was that Trump had given a speech about the Star of David tweet.

The New York Times' headline was, "In a Defiant, Angry Speech, Donald Trump Defends Image Seen as Anti-Semitic." The paper reported that "the bulk of Mr. Trump's energy was spent on the Twitter post." It might be hard for other observers to come away from the hour-plus performance convinced that the bulk of it was the four-and-a-half minutes spent on the tweet, but that is what the Times said.

The Washington Post's headline was, "Trump says campaign shouldn't have deleted image circulated by white supremacists."

Given reporting like that, multiplied many times by other news outlets, it's clear Trump faces an enormous, perhaps insurmountable obstacle in getting his message out. He clearly believes he is a great communicator, and he is in fact a very good one. But as a political speaker, Trump is so far outside the box that he has virtually overwhelmed the senses of those reporting and analyzing the news, making it difficult for some voters who haven't actually seen him to get a clear picture of his appeal to supporters.

Do Politicians Talk Down To Their Audiences?

It seems so long ago that we started discussing how Trump's 3rd or 4th grade vocabulary has worked so well for him in the Republican primary. He wasn't kidding when he said "We love the poorly educated." His simple language resonated with the Republican Party masses. The other day, Grammarly came out with a study exploring how politicians talk and how voters respond.

They went back into political history to analyze how presidential candidates have communicated with the electorate and have come to the conclusion that "over time, politicians have been simplifying their language by speaking in less complex sentences" and that "simple language correlates with higher poll results for Republican politicians" but not with Democrats. The study evaluated the complexity of politicians’ language using seven different clarity algorithms, such as sentence length and passive voice.

Since 1960 politicians of both parties have been simplifying their language to reach larger (and less educated) audiences. In 1960, 12.3% of Kennedy's and 13.8% of Nixon's sentences were rated as "complex." By 1992, only 9.0% of Bill Clinton's and 4.3% of George H.W. Bush's sentences were rated "complex." 6.3% of the sentences spoken by both McCain and Romney were rated complex while Obama averaged 10.6% over the two elections. During this cycle's primary debates Republicans who used simpler language tended to poll higher, the opposite of the result in the Democratic debates and polling results. In other words, Republicans who spoke without nuance and with childish vocabulary were more appreciated by Republican voters and Democratic voters appreciated more complex language and abstract thought. Trump spoke in the simplest language, only 3.3% of his sentences containing any complex language, compared to 6.3% of the relatively scholarly (or pompous) Marco Rubio or the 5.5% for Ivy Leaguer Ted Cruz. Cruz was about tied with Bernie and Hillary led the pack (7.87% of her sentences contained complex language) and she led the polling averages among the Democrats while Trump led among the Republicans.

The Willy Loman Of American Politics: Of Herr Trumpf's Five Most Used Words, #1 Is "I" And #4 is "Trump"

Have Men Gone Limp? and The America We Deserve author, Dave Shiflett-- who ghost-wrote the latter for Herr Trumpf-- announced on Fox's Alan Colmes Show Wednesday that he wouldn't vote for Herr, who he described as "very liberal" and as a person with "no class." He doesn't seem to have walked away from working with Trumpf with a good impression. "He’s got people thinking that he’s the man we need to stare down Vladimir Putin, for some reason. I mean, I don’t know who he’s actually stared down. He’s a real estate guy; I guess he’s had to stare down some cement contractors and stuff." Arthur Miller he's not.



It was just about a month ago when we looked an an analysis of Trumpf's vocabulary based on a Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test and saw that he speaks on a 4th grade level, lowest of any of the Republican candidates-- which, obviously, goes a very long way towards explaining why he is the favorite of the Republican voters. Dr. Ben, for example, speaks on an 8th grade level. Do you think typical Trumpf supporters can understand a thing he's saying?

Flattening the English language whenever he speaks without a script, Trump relies heavily on words such as "very" and "great," and the pronouns "we" and "I," which is his favorite word. As any news observer can observe, he lives to diminish his foes by calling them "losers," "total losers," "haters," "dumb," "idiots," "morons," "stupid," "dummy" and "disgusting." He can’t open his mouth without bragging about getting the Clintons to attend his wedding, about how smart he is, the excellence of his real estate projects, the brilliance of his TV show, his generous donations to other political campaigns and so on. In a freakish way, Trump resembles that of Muhammad Ali at his prime-- except the champ was always kidding (even when he was right) while Trump seems to believe his claims (and often is wrong). Or perhaps he is afflicted with binary vision disorder, which renders all within his eyeshot either great or rotten.


It’s obvious that Trump’s verbal deficit, as grating as it may be on the ears of the educated class, has not caused him much political pain. The media has noted the opposite: Trump’s overreliance on sports and war metaphors in his public utterances, his reductionist, one-dimensional policy prescriptions-- including nuanced geopolitical arguments such as get tough with China and Mexico, which are killing us!-- inspire trust in many rather than distrust. Trump’s rejection of "convoluted nuance" and "politically correct norms," mark him as authentic in certain corners and advance his cred as a plainspoken guardian of the American way. By not conforming to the standard oratorical style, he distinguishes himself from the pompous politician. Less is more when you’re speaking Trumpspeak.

While poor Jeb and his well-paid team of advisers plot how to beat Trumpf-- presumably after besting Rand Paul, Christie, Rubio, Dr. Ben and Cruz, all of whom are beating him at the moment-- by using words like "jerk" and "unhinged" and calling him the "chaos candidate," language experts are once again trying to figure out Trumpfian appeal based on the crap that comes pouring out of his mouth. They are finding that he's "unlike other presidential candidates in almost every way in terms of his speech-- his word choice, his way he tells stories, and even how he uses his hands. Mark Yoffe Liberman, at Herr's alter mater, University of Pennsylvania, compared the transfer student from Fordham whose rich parents bought him a transfer to the one Ivy League school that would take him to the Jebster, who graduated from the elite Phillips Academy in Andover before being rejected by Yale and being forced to go to the University of Texas.

What he found was that Bush talks, predictably, like most politicians. His most-used words are rather big and policy-like-- “strategy,” “government,” “president,” and “American” all placed in his list of top 13 words. Six out of those 13 are one syllable, like “growth” and “state.” His favorite word is “the.”

Trump’s favorite word, however, is “I.” His fourth-favorite word is “Trump.” Eight out of his 13 favorite words are one syllable, and the two syllable words are simple-- “very,” “China,” and “money.” His only three-syllable favorite word is “Mexico.”

“These words bespeak a world of difference between the mentalities of the two men,” UPenn professor of Chinese language and literature Victor Mair commented on his colleague Liberman’s findings, which he posted on his popular blog Language Log. Later, Liberman published another post finding that, while Bush uses more complex words than Trump, Trump actually talks way more than Bush.

“Bush displays his vocabulary at a greater rate; that is, he uses a larger number of distinct word types for a given number of word tokens,” he wrote.

Word choice isn’t the only way Trump differs from his presidential candidate contemporaries. Jennifer Sclafani, an associate professor at Georgetown University who studies the construction of political identity through language, said Trump is an enigma-- the “anti-politician” when it comes to talking.

“The impression from people I talk to just casually is that he comes off as incoherent, that you can’t really grasp the core of what he’s saying,” she said.

...Overall, when it comes to the political world, Trump’s language defies precedent. But for Sclafani, she thinks she may know where it all comes from.

“He’s turning political discourse into reality TV,” she said. “I’m sure if someone did a study on discourse structures of reality television shows, and compared it what he’s doing, there might be some overlap.”

Trumpf uses the language and sentence construction to communicate to 4th graders, the lowest level of any candidate from either party. Who do you think aims highest? That's right-- Bernie Sanders gears his message towards men and women with high school educations. He's logical and his arguments are values-based. He would make the greatest president in contemporary history. Please consider helping him get there-- and stopping Herr Trumpf from dragging us down.

Trump Insists Everyone Speak English... But He Speaks A Language Of Obfuscation

I'm not sure how relevant Bill Kristol, son of Irving, is to anything anymore, but the neoconservative fanatic, the founder and editor of the Weekly Standard, sits on a bunch of wingnut think tank boards with Robert Kagan and Liz Cheney. He's best known for having been key to preventing millions of Americans from getting health insurance in 1993 and for helping gin up a climate of hysteria that worked to allow Bush and Cheney to start-- and then expand-- the unjustified and catastrophic Iraq War. Also, some people credit him for inventing Sarah Palin as a national figure. 

But yesterday Kristol announced he would like to draft either Dick Cheney or Arkansas psychotic Tom Cotton to run as a third-party candidate if Trump wins the GOP nomination, as now looks very plausible.

Kristol's beefs with Trumpy are that he's not a serious neocon and that he insulted Kristol hero John McCain and that he backs some economic positions that benefit working families-- standard GOP establishment drivel they keep throwing at Trump with little to no effect, although it's worth noting that now that Wall Street banksters are fretting, even "terrified," over a potential Trump presidency and are making it clear that they're perfectly happy backing Hillary if Trump is the nominee, the GOP is likely to move into high gear against Trump.

Trump says he's not afraid of the bankster-predators:

Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton will continue to let Wall Street and the 'hedge fund guys' rip off the people by paying no or very little in taxes. They have total and complete control of Hillary, Jeb and others running. My campaign is self- funded. The only people that have control of me are the people of the United States.

That of course is a lie-- the part about the self-funding, not the part about Wall Street controlling Hillary and Jeb, which is spot on. The media never asks him about the money flowing into the Make America Great Again SuperPAC run by Trumpite Jon Anderson, which Anderson admits "intends to raise funds in unlimited amounts." It has already started and accepted a six-figure check from convicted campaign-finance fraudster and close Trump crony Charles Kushner.

When Trump visited The Tonight Show last week, Jimmy Fallon's second question was, "How are you going to create jobs in this country?" Trump responded, "I'm just going to do it." When Fallon followed up with "But how?," Trump said, "By doing it. It just happens. Just by doing it." Enlightening... not!

Trump knows very well how to speak without letting anyone pin him down to anything that could pin him down in the future. Ads like this one the Club for Growth released in Iowa (a million dollars' worth of time) yesterday will make the straight-talker-who-isn't even more weasel-like.



Political speechwriter Barton Swaim, author of The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics, is concerned about political language. In yesterday's Washington Post, he took a look at Trump's use of language. What he finds most distrinctive about Trump's rise is the structure of his language.

Everybody senses that Trump doesn't speak like other politicians. But how is his speech different, exactly? Is it just the swagger, the dismissive tone and clipped accent? Maybe in part. Trump does seem emotionally engaged in a way none of his competitors do; he is perpetually annoyed-- exasperated that things aren't as they should be-- but somehow also good-humored about it. (Chris Christie and John Kasich seem perpetually annoyed, too, but there is nothing funny or cheerful about their versions.)

To get at what makes Trump’s language different, take a look at the shape of his sentences. They don't work the way modern political rhetoric does-- they work the way punchlines work: short (sometimes very short) with the most important words at the end.

That’s rare among modern politicians, and not simply because they lack Trump’s showmanship or comedic gifts. It’s rare because most successful modern politicians are habitually careful with their language. They are keenly aware of the ways in which any word they speak may be interpreted or misinterpreted by journalists and partisan groups and constituencies and demographic groups.

And so in important situations-- situations in which they know a lot depends on what they say or don’t say-- their language takes on (at least) two peculiar characteristics. First, their syntax tends to abstraction. They speak less about particular things and people-- bills, countries, identifiable officials-- and more about “legislation” and “the international community” and “officials” and “industry” and “Washington” and “government.”

Second, their sentences take on a higher number of subordinate clauses and qualifying phrases-- “over the last several years,” “in general,” “in effect,” “what people are telling me,” and so on. This is the kind of language you use when you’re aware that your words might be misinterpreted or used against you.

When used well, it conveys competence and assures listeners that the speaker thinks coherent thoughts and holds reasonable positions. It suggests that the speaker cares about the truth of his claims. But politicians are frequently too careful with their language, and this conscientiousness can begin to sound like deceit or cowardice. When they rely too heavily on abstractions, when they avoid concrete nouns, when all their statements seem always hedged by qualifying phrases, they sound like politicians, in the worst sense of the word. To my ear, anyway, Hillary Clinton sounds this way almost all the time.

Whether used well or poorly, however, the language of a typical modern politician has a distinctive sound to it. It sounds complex and careful-- sometimes sophisticated, sometimes emotive, sometimes artificial or over-scripted, but always circumspect and inevitably disingenuous.

Trump’s language is from another rhetorical tradition entirely. Consider his hour-long media availability on Sept. 3, just after he’d signed a “loyalty pledge” that he wouldn’t run as a third-party candidate if he loses the GOP nomination. Some of his answers last only a few seconds, some are slightly longer, but almost all consist of simple sentences, grammatically and conceptually, and most of them withhold their most important word or phrase until the very end. Trump’s sentences end with a pop, and he seems to know instinctively where to put the emphasis in each one.



Near the beginning of the news conference, he says: “I don’t need money. I don’t want money. And this is going to be a campaign, I think, like no other. I’m not controlled by lobbyists. I’m not controlled by anybody.”

This is not the language of a typical politician.

Someone asks Trump about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) remark that he, Christie, didn’t need the chairman of the Republican National Committee to meet with him in order to beg him to sign a loyalty pledge. Another politician-- a politician wanting to take a shot at Christie-- might have answered, “Well I’m not sure why anybody would need Gov. Christie to sign a loyalty pledge, given his standing in the polls right now.”

That would have gotten a chuckle. But Trump worded his answer far better:

“Well, you don’t have to be met when you’re at 2 percent.”

His comedic instinct, I think, told him it was worth some awkward wording at the beginning of the sentence (“you don’t have to be met”) in order to put the words “2 percent” at the very end. Pop. Hardy laughter.

Trump’s lengthier answers, too, involve mostly short, grammatically uncomplicated sentences, with very few of the complicating phrases you hear from an ordinary politician who’s trying hard not to say something obviously false or stupid. Oftentimes his answers, when transcribed one sentence per line, read like free verse poetry. Asked a question about Jeb Bush, for instance, Trump replies:

Jeb Bush is a very nice man.

I’ll be honest; I think he’s a very nice person.

I think he’s a very low-energy person, and I don’t think that’s what the country needs.

I hear that he’s going to spend a lot of money on negative ads on me, and honestly-- look, he’s getting the money from special interests.

He’s getting the money from lobbyists and his donors.

And they’re making him do it because he’s crashing in the polls.

So I don’t know what’s gonna happen.

If he spends $20 million or $25 million on negative ads, I don’t know.

I know that my life will continue.

I just don’t know.

I mean, nobody’s ever spent money on ads against me.

But he probably has to do that, although it would not be the way I would do it.

His sentences get even shorter when he lapses into his campaign boilerplate. Politicians do this all the time. When the question is general enough, they move quickly from answering it to expatiating on general themes. But when Trump does it, his sentences contract to little more than a subject, a verb, and usually a direct object. Most range between five and fifteen syllables.

Our country could be doing much better.

We have deficits that are enormous.

We have all bad trade agreements.

We have an army that the head [Gen. Raymond Odierno] said is not prepared.

We have a military that needs help, and especially in these times.

We have nuclear weapons that-- you look at 60 Minutes-- they don’t even work.

The phones don’t work.

They’re 40 years old.

They have wires that are no good.

Nothing works.

Our country doesn’t work.

Everybody wins except us.

We need victories in this country.

We don’t have victories anymore.

Our country will be great again, but right now our country has major problems.

The words themselves are mostly preposterous. Other than “We have deficits that are enormous” and the one about Odierno, they range between laughable exaggeration and nonsense. What makes them effective in their way is that they don’t sound like political speech. Politicians in modern democracies just don’t talk this way.

Trump makes no effort-- or seems to make no effort-- to measure the effect of his propositions on different constituencies. He seems genuinely unaware that anybody might try to pick them apart. He makes no effort to hedge his statements or phrase them in such a way that they are at least defensible. Indeed, you don’t feel you’re listening to a politician at all. You feel you’re listening to a man who has rejected the conventions of electoral politics altogether -- someone who’s opted out of the whole charade.

The result, for probably the great majority of people who follow politics, is alternately comical and horrifying. But for people who’ve grown weary of politicians using vague and convoluted language to lull or impress their listeners, to preserve their options and to avoid criticism, Trump sounds refreshingly clear and forthright. I don’t share their view, but I find it hard to blame them.

Another way to look at Trump's use of language is to remember that his goal is always deception and that he's a compulsive, self-aggrandizing liar. If something sounds like it might not be true, you can take that to the bank. He uses language to hide things, not to clarify anything; not ever. Last night, on her show, Rachel Maddow exposed how Trump used the decommissioned USS Iowa to deceive the American public once again. It was classic Trump-- something that would have instantly sunk any other candidate in history. Trump claimed a veteran's group with "hundreds of thousands" of members had endorsed him and he was raising thens of thousands of dollars for them. Except there is only one member of the "group." Literally. Watch: