However, what that analysis gains in drama it loses in scientific necessity. The essence of “Trumptalk” is something quite ordinary, what linguists call unmonitored language. The kink is that formality, impact, and gravity typically elicit monitored language. Writing is deliberate, allowing us to edit, amend, and correct. The formal statement—as in, to the American public and the world beyond—is typically either read from writing, or even if ad libbed is couched carefully and reflectively in the same air as writing. Unmonitored language is most of the language in the typical person’s life: casual speech, texts, tweets. Humans are genetically specified to use it and none has ever been known to lack it—it comes easily.
Trump takes it easy. It only compounds the pain and embarrassment so many Americans feel when watching spectacles such as his taking a knee before a foreign power accused of harming the U.S. electoral process. It’s bad enough that Trump lacks the substance to care about his job beyond how it impacts his score-keeping sense of ego. What makes it worse is that—in line with his lecturing government leaders on the basis of gut feelings, blithely stepping in front of the Queen, scarfing his Big Macs, and lacking an impulse to even pretend to have any interest in the arts—he is the first president who, rather than striding forward and speaking, just gets up and talks. Welcome to the queer circumstance of unmonitored language as officialese. [...]
Or take the fact that in the very tweet in which Trump trumpeted his right to use capitals for emphasis, he told us that “the Fake News constantly likes to pour over my tweets looking for a mistake.” Unless Trump intended the liquid connotation, this is a typo, and a rather glaring one—suggesting again a basic lack of attention. Here is a president who is sharing with us without checking it over first. Generously, we might imagine that he uses a spell-check but that even such programs miss misspellings that are other words, such as pour. But this analysis founders upon Trump’s references in other tweets to “unpresidented” acts, such as President Barack Obama daring to “tapp” his phone. Trump clearly is no champion speller—“NO COLUSION” was scrawled on the typescript of his “double negative” script. Many of us aren’t—but we’d make sure nobody knew it if we were president. Trump can’t be bothered.
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