National Post (National Edition)
From ‘bigly’ to me
DONALD TRUMP REDEFINES THE POLITICAL LEXICON
After years of complaining their politicians had become scripted robots, U.S. voters were suddenly presented with a candidate who is a linguist’s dream. Donald Trump spouts words, expressions and intonations used by no other would-be president in modern U.S. history. Tristin Hopper gives a by-no-means comprehensive summary of the Republican’s language anomalies.
LOST IN TRANSLATION
For non-English reporters, translating a U.S. presidential race is normally easy. One candidate talks about the poor. Another talks about freedom. And at some point someone might mention a “bridge to the future.” But Trump is filling notebooks with terms like “Crooked Hillary,” “like a bitch” and saying Mitt Romney “would have dropped to his knees” for an endorsement in 2012. These can be a bit tricky to render in Hebrew, Mandarin or Russian. One Chinese news site, for instance, translated Trump’s “I was on her like a bitch, and I could not get there” to “I pursued her like a harlot/strumpet, but I could not succeed.”
YOU’VE HEARD IT BEFORE
A product of the Dale Carnegie-influenced world of New York business, Trump almost never uses “filler” words like “uh” and “um.” Instead, while he is forming his next thought, he fills the time with repetition. The result is seemingly fluent speeches, which can go for long stretches without any new information. A one-paragraph response at Wednesday’s debate, for instance, included the sentences “Putin has outsmarted her,” “she’s been outsmarted by Putin” and “she has been outsmarted.”
MOATLOADS OF MALAPROPISMS
Trump speaks more off-the-cuff than almost any other presidential candidate since the invention of television. As a rookie, he hasn’t had a chance to iron out several tics most politicians would have caught during their first run for state senate. He says “bigly,” which may be a contraction of “big league.” He said Hillary Clinton got “schlonged” in her 2008 run for president — possibly because he was trying for a Yiddish word that didn’t mean “penis.” Wednesday, he referred to “swatches of land,” when he was presumably trying to say “swaths of land.”
THE GREATEST HYPERBOLE OF ALL TIME IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Politicians generally try to manage expectations by not making overly grandiose statements that may come back to haunt them. Trump, on the other hand, routinely declares things to be the greatest or worst of all time. Barack Obama is the “the worst president in the history of the United States.” NAFTA is the “single worst trade deal ever approved.” And, most famously, “nobody has more respect for women than I do.”
EVERYONE’S A LIAR
Modern U.S. politicians normally steer clear of calling their opponent a liar in public. They would say that person is wrong, reckless, mistaken or distorting the facts. But Trump has not only used the L-word with abandon, he’s probably ushered it into a new golden age. Thus, he dubbed Republican rival Ted Cruz “Lyin’ Ted” and accused Hillary Clinton repeatedly of lying during the official presidential debates.
INSULT HAIKUS
In February, the liberal website Talking Points Memo discovered a formula in Trump’s Twitter takedowns of opponents: three-sentence insult haikus. The site describes it thusly, “single clause declarative sentence, single clause declarative sentence, primary adjective/term of derision.” For instance, “Ted Cruz should be disqualified from his fraudulent win in Iowa. Weak RNC and Republican leadership probably won’t let this happen! Sad.”
LOTS OF ‘FRIENDS’
Trump likes to tell lengthy anecdotes starring an unnamed “friend.” There are Chinese friends, Muslim friends, Jewish friends, “a friend that is a trucker” and “friends that are absolute great manufacturers.” He certainly has a lot of friends, but the advantage of using anonymous sources is they can’t be fact checked. When Trump talks about appointing his “phenomenal worldclass poker player” friend to a diplomatic position, reporters can’t call up the friend to get his thoughts on foreign trade.
HE CHANTS SOMETIMES
While Hillary Clinton has spent 20 years being ridiculed as a robot, linguist Mark Liberman noted Donald Trump delivered an entire line in a perfect monotone. This month in Mannheim, Pa., he said, “We are going to make American great again” without deviating from a frequency of 238 Hz (about B flat on the keyboard). “I haven’t heard this type of chanting before from Mr. Trump, or indeed from any other political figure,” wrote Liberman, who studies intonation.
THE “THE” PROBLEM
In 2008, John McCain wast ridiculed for saying “the Google.” Eight years later, Donald Trump keeps tacking on an extra “the” before ethnic groups: “the African Americans”; “the Hispanics”; “the gays.” In an essay, University of Sussex linguist Lynne Murphy said this has the effect of portraying these groups as “an undifferentiated whole.” Saying “African Americans live in the inner city,” for instance, means some of them live in the inner city. But saying “the African Americans live in the inner city” implies there are no non-inner city black people.
MY FAVOURITE THINGS
Way back in September 2015, Mark Liberman crunched the numbers on another linguistic Trumpism when he tracked the words most frequently used by Trump and his rival, Jeb Bush. Bush’s top 10 words, in order, were “the state strategy government should create president American in growth.” Trump’s were “I they you Trump very great he China said me.”