If Donald Trump, God forbid, wins a second term, can someone please teach him a few more words? His severely limited vocabulary may be the least of our problems, but the president’s propensity to continuously spew out the same monosyllabic mush is way beyond annoying.
He’s like Mattel’s Chatty Cathy doll from the ‘60s. With the pull of a string, she would let loose with one of a handful of preprogrammed phrases. And then repeat them over and over and over, until a highly agitated parent, in the dark of night, grabbed a scissors and silenced the doll with a snip of her string.
Studies have shown that most adults have a vocabulary in the range of 20,000 to 35,000 words. Trump, it seems, is limited to seven on a good day. Well, that is a slight exaggeration. Academicians who put their sanity on the line in order to scientifically analyze the president’s unscripted speech found that he uses 2,605 “unique words”, the lowest of any president.
That means we hear him spout the same utterances ad nauseum: “no collusion”, “build the wall”, “lock her up”, and “believe me”. One study by USA Today found that Trump used six words more than 500 times while talking about immigration in 2018: “predator”, “invasion”, “alien”, “killer”, “criminal” and “animal”.
In order to capture the full depth and range of our life experiences, the things we see, hear, touch, smell and feel, along with a vast array of modifiers that help describe them, we have been given an English language of well over one million words. Because our president ignores 99.9 percent of them, he has to overwork his limited verbal repertoire, forcing a modicum of words to depict vastly disparate meanings.
For example, within a period of three minutes last week, Trump trotted out one of his favorite phrases, “very special”, no less than four times. The occasion was a Congressional Medal of Honor Ceremony honoring an Army officer. Since he was still basking in the self-reverential glow from the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the president reminded those assembled that the killing was “something very special.” Then he placed the medal around the recipient’s neck and announced that “this is a very special thing.” Introducing the soldier’s relatives, Trump said they are “a very special family.” He wasn’t done. Trump recognized three Republican senators helping him with his impeachment battle: Sens. John Cornyn, Ted Cruz and Thom Tillis. He labeled them “very special warriors.”
A few days earlier, the Donald called Turkey’s ceasefire in a battle he greenlighted “something very special.” A quick Google search using the terms “Trump” and “very special”, showed that the latter phrase is not limited to military matters. Former Playboy model Karen McDougal told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that the president handed her money after she was intimate with him. She said she refused to take it, prompting Trump to tell her she was “very special”.
In a somewhat awkward moment at the start of the #metoo movement in 2017, the guy who boasted of sexually assaulting women and had been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 25 of them, was asked at a news conference if he had a message on this subject. Said Trump: “Women are very special. I think it’s a very special time.” Two years later, the president was asked to say a few words to two female astronauts as they walked in space. “What you do,” Trump told them, “is really something very special.”
Just this past July, he used the same phrase to create profound anatomical confusion. Announcing a new program to combat kidney disease, Trump said: “The kidney has a very special place in the heart.” As powerful as words can be, they have their limit. To use the same term to describe misplaced organs, the murder of a terrorist leader and a woman who does not charge for sex is definitely pushing the lexical envelope.
He did the same with “witch hunt”. The term turns up more than 400 times in the Trump Twitter Archive. In a data base of his speeches, interviews and news conferences, “witch hunt” references far exceed policy discussions. When former GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain ran into sexual harassment accusations in 2011, Trump called it a “witch hunt”. When the New York attorney general went after banks in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Trump called it a “witch hunt”. When students at Trump University filed a fraud suit against him in 2013, Trump called it a “witch hunt”.
Then came the Mueller investigation, spawning more than 250 tweets that called the probe the “greatest witch hunt in the history of our country.” That designation was short lived, however. In the past month, Trump has called the impeachment inquiry the “greatest witch hunt in American history”.
A recent addition to the abbreviated Trump lexicon has been, for obvious reasons, “corruption”. Once the whistle blower report surfaced, along with evidence that the president was conditioning assistance to Ukraine on that country digging up dirt that Trump could use in his reelection campaign, a flimsy line of defense emerged: The Donald was pushing Ukraine to clean up its own corruption.
That resulted in Trump using the word “corruption” 29 times in 23 minutes a few weeks ago. Here’s a snippet from his rambling rant: “I’m only interested in corruption. I don’t care about politics. I don’t care about (Joe) Biden’s politics. . .I don’t care about politics. But I do care about corruption, and this whole thing is about corruption. . .This is about corruption, and this is not about politics.”
Corruption quickly became the word of the month for him. Asked by a reporter whether he stands by his personal attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, who is reportedly under investigation for his involvement in the Ukraine fiasco, Trump offered this backhanded compliment: “Rudy is a great gentleman. He looks for corruption wherever he goes. He’s always looking for corruption.”
During the Republican presidential primary campaign, Trump frequently boasted about his superior intelligence and spectacular vocabulary. “I know words,” he told a rally in South Carolina. “I have the best words.” What he didn’t say is that he can count those words on the fingers of his two tiny hands. Meanwhile, for many of us, there is only one word we long to hear from this president: GOODBYE.
Now that would be so very special.
What a very special commentary.
Haha, Bruce. Let’s hope the day comes when we can hear him say over & over, “Let me out, let me out….”