Category: Language

WHEN TRUMP TALKS, ENGLISH TEACHERS TRY NOT TO LISTEN

The first review of our 45th president’s verbal skills came seconds after he finished his inaugural address. According to New York Magazine, the 43rd president, George W. Bush, turned to those next to him and said, “That was some weird shit.” This from the guy who once said, “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.” Clearly, the torch of presidential inarticulateness has been passed.

Donald Trump makes Bush look like a master wordsmith. In a recent interview with the Associated Press, here’s how the Donald responded to a question about alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election: “ . . . there is no collusion between certainly myself and my campaign, but I can always speak for myself – and the Russians, zero.” Weird shit, indeed.

Trump’s difficulty in constructing a compound sentence without merging two disparate thoughts, mixed with a propensity to drain meaning from words through overuse, has been analyzed by a host of academicians. Linguists used something called the Flesch-Kincaid readability test to place his speeches at a fourth grade level. Psychologists compared transcripts of Trump interviews in the 1980s with those from the last four months and concluded that there has been significant cognitive decline. All this must be pleasing the president in some perverse way. The very elites who Trump thought were ignoring him are now giving him the kind of rapt attention that Jane Goodall bestowed on her chimps.

As for this expert analysis, I’m inclined to heed the cautionary observation of New York Times columnist David Brooks: “We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.”

And beep they do. Responding to the Manchester concert bombing this week, Trump told the world that, from this day forward, he will refer to terrorists not as “monsters, which they would like,” but as “losers.” This nomenclature upgrade, as the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank noted, puts suicide bombers in an eclectic grouping. Here are just a few of the prior inductees in Trump’s Loser Hall of Shame: Rosie O’Donnell, Cher, Rihanna, Mark Cuban, George Will, an astrologer in Cleveland, Gwyneth Paltrow, John McCain and the Huffington Post. Using the same description for Rihanna and a terrorist empties the word of all meaning.

Yet, this limited vocabulary is not the biggest impediment in deciphering the president’s messages. That prize goes to an attention span that frequently changes subjects multiple times in the same sentence. In the AP interview, for example, Trump was asked about the funding of his proposed wall along the Mexican border. His answer: “People want the border wall. My base definitely wants the border wall, my base really wants it – you’ve been to many of the rallies. OK, the thing they want more than anything is the wall. My base, which is a big base; I think my base is 45 percent. You know, it’s funny. The Democrats, they have a big advantage in the Electoral College. Big, big, big advantage. . .The Electoral College is very difficult for a Republican to win, and I will tell you, the people want to see it. They want to see the wall.”

Trump’s unofficial record for a run-on sentence came during the Republican primaries when he once managed to utter 285 words on more than 15 subjects, all without ever taking a breath or using a period. Slate posted the monstrosity on its website and invited readers to take a crack at diagramming it with the Reed-Kellogg method, the bane of many an English class back in the old days. In lieu of cluttering this space with a 285-word Trump sentence, here’s the link, if you are up for a challenge. Like most of his off-the cuff soliloquies, it is peppered with repetitive words and phrases, like: “very good, very smart”, “oh, do they do a number” and “who would have thought?” Linguists, reported Slate’s Katy Waldman, have suggested that Trump’s overuse of such semantically non-meaningful words implies that he is “too distracted by the pleasure and theater of vocalizing to deliver any actual substance.”

Emphasizing theatrics over substance, may be an acceptable rhetorical device in sales, but a lot of folks expect meaningful and understandable content from the leader of the free world. Imagine the shock this week when Trump, after flying from Saudi Arabia to Tel Aviv, told a room of Israeli leaders that, “We just got back from the Middle East.” The smiling president thought he’d just delivered an applause line, but instead got a stunned reaction from an audience wondering how the guy who wants to broker a regional peace deal has no idea that Israel is in the Middle East.

In reporting on advance work for the president’s first trip abroad, Foreign Affairs said White House staff took precautions to protect their boss from verbal stumbles. Heads of state were advised to limit themselves to two-to-four minutes of discussion time, knowing how difficult it would be to hold Trump’s interest past that point. In an effort to keep him on script, Washington Monthly reported that aides tried to limit briefing notes to one page and inserted Trump’s name in every paragraph because, said a staffer, “he keeps reading it if he’s mentioned.”

Say what you want about George W. Bush, and there is a lot to say. Yet, nobody ever had to childproof his foreign trips.

LOOKING FOR THE REAL MEANING OF IT ALL? CHECK THE PUNCTUATION

Our daily news diet now brings us scintillating reports on the Oxford comma and the meaning of quotation marks. What a delightful spring diversion from a depressingly bleak winter of Trump atrocities. Punctuation has always generated a level of electric excitation and enthusiasm on a par with, say, a convention of actuaries. Aside from small cohorts of passionate grammarians, reveling in the nuances of commas and the elegance of a well-placed ellipsis, most of us have paid little attention to the subject since we left middle school.

That was obviously our mistake, for punctuation is power. Just ask those Maine truck drivers for Oakhurst Dairy who are about to pick up a ton of overtime pay thanks to a comma that wasn’t there. They were the heroes of the Oxford comma story that made headlines these past few days. In case you missed it, check the link if you want to wander into the weeds of sentence structure. Otherwise this abbreviated Cliff note ought to do: The drivers went after four years of unpaid overtime. The company said the they were exempt under state law. The judge ruled them eligible for the time-and-a-half pay on the basis of a missing comma in the statute. Every demeaned English teacher in Maine suddenly had a perfect answer to their students’ question of, “Why do we have the learn this stuff?”.

Even Trump jumped on the punctuation bandwagon this week. When his lie about Obama wiretapping him went up in flames, the president suddenly turned into a strict language constructionist. He noted that he placed quote marks around “wiretapped” in his accusatory tweet. In The Donald’s style book, such punctuation expands the word’s meaning to include any form of surreptitious eavesdropping, from an ear against a door to, as his faithful whisperer Kellyanne Conway suggested, a microwave oven.

If punctuation has the power to turn a wiretap into a microwave, it is nothing to be trifled with. The truth of the matter is that punctuators have forever left their marks on our perpetual search for meaning. For example:

• The use of a comma instead of a dash caused the most expensive typographical error in congressional history. The Tariff Act of 1872 listed specific goods that were to be exempt from the import tax. Congress had intended to place “fruit-plants” on the tax exempt list, but the final version of the law used a comma instead of a dash: “fruit, plants,” instead of “fruit-plants”. As a result, no tax could be collected on fruit or plants of any kind. The loss of revenue amounted to $40 million in today’s dollars.

• A semicolon in the Texas Constitution invalidated an election and ignited a mass revolt. An angry and unstable Reconstructionist governor, obsessed with succession, was defeated by a Democrat in 1873. The legislature had changed the voting from four consecutive days in each county seat to one day in each precinct. That modification was the basis for the Texas Supreme Court to throw out the election. Because of a semicolon’s placement in the constitution’s election language, the justices said the legislature could change the voting venue but not the length of the polling period. Texans were so outraged that they rioted in the streets. The anger lingered for decades and the justices who wrote the decision were forever referred to as the “Semicolon Court.” According to a piece written for the Notre Dame Law Review, Texas lawyers to this day are so ashamed of the “Semicolon Decision” that they refuse to cite it as a legal authority.

• A million dollar comma brought a pair of Canadian communication giants to court. Rogers and Bell Aliant entered into a business contract that was to last five years and for subsequent terms of five years after that, “unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.” Bell tried to end the deal with a one-year notice shortly after the contract was signed. Rogers said the agreement could only be terminated after five years. The initial finding was in favor of Bell, based on the placement of a comma. Through the wonders of bilingualism, however, Rogers won the day. Turns out that the contract was prepared in both English and French and the latter version was missing the comma.

• A missing comma won a not guilty verdict for a Columbus, Ohio woman who left her pickup truck on a city street for more than 24 hours. Andrea Cammelleri, obviously paid attention in her English class. According to the Columbus Dispatch, she told the judge that the ordinance banning daylong parking covers “any motor vehicle camper, trailer, farm implement. . .” The judge agreed that the lack of a comma after “motor vehicle,” necessarily excludes pickup trucks from the ban. Case dismissed.

• Another comma that wasn’t there continues to keep records on police shootings private in Tennessee. The state’s bureau of investigation looked into the fatal shooting of a 19-year-old black man by a white Memphis police officer. The Memphis City Council issued a subpoena for the bureau’s case files. A judge looked at the statutory language dealing with police shootings. It says such records can be released “only in compliance with a subpoena or an order of a court of record.” The ruling? Because the clause is lacking a comma, both the subpoena and the order must come from a court, not a city council or other non-judicial authority. For lack of a comma, the records remain sealed.

In another generation or two, all of this comma and semicolon stuff may go the way of the typewriter and rotary phone. As you read this sentence, academic linguists are busy dissecting tweets, texts and posts. Their early findings? Social media writing is almost punctuation free, except for liberal use of exclamation marks. Imagine a future court trying to interpret legislative intent by counting exclamation points. And issuing a decision that says, simply, “WTF!!!!!!!”.