Tongue Lashing: SCROTUSese Part 2

Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis, 7-27-2017

"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." -- George Orwell

In my last post I looked at some aspects of the language of the Twitiot.  I looked mostly at the incredulity of it: the bizarre discourse, the tweeting, the nonsense.

Today, in Part 2, I look at the ways in which the language of the Rabid Yam is changing our very language, the way we use it and the words we use.

SCROTUS is using a whole new kind of language, different from any President before and different than most government officials. I'm calling it Ugly Talk. It's the language that demeans, disparages, and incites hate against groups, particularly Mexicans, women, and Muslims.

Ugly Talk is becoming the new normal.

This week he described Mexicans this way:

The predators and criminal aliens who poison our communities with drugs and prey on innocent young people — these beautiful, beautiful, innocent young people — will find no safe haven anywhere in our country. 

And you've seen the stories about some of these animals. They don't want to use guns, because it's too fast and it's not painful enough. So they'll take a young, beautiful girl, 16, 15, and others, and they slice them and dice them with a knife, because they want them to go through excruciating pain before they die. And these are the animals that we've been protecting for so long. Well, they're not being protected any longer, folks.

The one time he can string words together in Standard American English, he uses horrendous imagery to disparage Mexicans. This quote is so packed with unpleasantness, it is hard to absorb.

This week he also spoke to a group of police officers. He encouraged them to go ahead and be rough. Here is some Ugly Talk to police officers:

Now, we’re getting them out anyway, but we’d like to get them out a lot faster. And when you see these towns, and when you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough — I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’ 

Like, when you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put your hand over their head. Like, don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody. Don’t hit their head. I said, ‘You can take the hand away, O.K.?’

We all know about his hateful language toward women. There are dozens of examples and I really don't want to present them here. You know what they are and where to find them.  His language about women is some of the ugliest of Ugly Talk.

With him as a role model and thereby an appover of Ugly Talk, his staff also has started using detestable language. The new Whitewash House Communications Director, --communications director-- smarm-master Anthony Scaramucci, in an interview with the New York Times, said these things that follow. I'm sorry for this language on my blog. It is bigly Ugly Talk. Our government officials now communicate this way.

What I want to do is I want to fucking kill all the leakers and I want to get the President's agenda on track so we can succeed for the American people.

 I'm not Steve Bannon, I'm not trying to suck my own cock.

Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac..."Let me leak the fucking thing and see if I can cock-block these people the way I cock-blocked Scaramucci for six months."

What is becoming of us?!

It's scary to think that this bullying language is becoming the new normal. We can't let this become normal.


Not only is Ugly Talk becoming the normal government style, language is becoming meaningless. Lies are alternative facts.  News is fake.

"Fake News."  Now that's a loaded phrase, isn't it?  It used to be relegated to the likes of tabloids like The National Enquirer or Weekly World News, both of which enticed us at supermarket checkout counters with blazing headlines claiming, Elvis Is Alive! or  Ted Kennedy Secret Love Child!

<As an aside, I find it surreally ironic that one of SCROTUS's allies in the press is the freaking National Enquirer, the Grand-daddy of Fake News.>

Legitimately fake news became part of the national consciousness around election time, when it was brought to light that news stories on social media were made up, meant to mislead, misdirect, and incite. It was shown that big data could be used to target individuals with news that would influence them. I explored this subject in depth in one of my early posts.

After Hair Hitler won, the definition of "fake news" simply became "news that SCROTUS doesn't like."  There's real power in those two words. The phrase undermines the legitimate press, a institution that is important to the very core of our Nation's identity and security. We depend on the press to be the eyes and ears of the People. To call them "fake" is to de-legitimize them, to de-legitimize us, the Citizens. It upends one of our very basic tenants of our Republic - the First Amendment of the United States Constitution! And that is disturbing. And not normal. And it shows that language can be powerful and dangerous.

Read this article from NPR, which, with linguist George Lakeoff, parses the phrase "fake news" and illustrates the real danger of this concept becoming the norm.

Bigly. Sad! Tremendous. Yuuuuuge. These SCROTUS-isms are slithering into our vernacular.  The New York Times used a SCROTUS-tweet-style headline recently:   Trump: Trapped in his Lies, Keeps Lying. Sad! 

Even before the election, his catch-phrases crept into advertisements. His style is mimicked by comedians, cartoonists,  and the man on the street. TЯUMP-isms have found their way into our fabric. And they may be changing political discourse forever, in all the ways that I've outlined here.

Watch this excellent video about how SCROTUS-ims are changing our language, quickly and bigly.

So, Little Sister Resister, are there any positive ways that SCROTUS's language usage is changing us?

I'm glad you asked! You know that Little Sister Resister tries to find the positives in this nightmare we are living through.  And, acutually, yes, there are some tremendous positives!

45 is making dictionaries great again! People are becoming more tuned in, listening closer, and they are looking up words more often. People are looking to Dictionaries to be a trustworthy source to lead them the Truth. ...And the more Truth in these weird Orwellian times, the better. 

Another positive. Nascent English-as-a-second-langauge learners are using TЯUMP speeches to help them learn the language.  His simplistic, repetitive style, it turns out, is a perfect place to learn English. Kind of scary, yes, I admit it.....but any learning is good learning in my book! 

OK. That's all the positives I could find.  Oh, maybe one more.  His language is fodder for our comedians. I leave you with Samantha Bee, in an avant-garde short film rendering of the wonders of SCROTUS-ese. 

As always, thank you for reading. And keep up the Resistance!

The Language Butcher

"The Portrait of a Blinking Idiot"

--Arragon, The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare

Little Sister Resister is a language person, and always has been. Language has been my avocation and also my vocation. So, I find the unique new-found language of SCROTUSese fascinating. It's also disgusting and frustrating and confounding.

The Linguist in me wants to look at his language scientifically. There is nothing I'd love better than to analyze his speech myself. But I don't have the time, nor truthfully, the expertise. But luckily there have been plenty of language scientists analyzing his language for us. 

SCROTUS himself has said “I love the poorly educated!” -- and we know he loves himself most of all. So, let's look at this Language Butcher, shall we?

One of the first probes into his language that I found interesting was this analysis, posted on YouTube a full year before the election.  It's an interesting theory, that he is a salesman and uses language to that end.

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The video analysis above points out that other analyists have pegged SCROTUS's language at a 4th grade level.

A different analysis (cited here by the Washington Post) that looks at Presidential language complexity throughout history, pegs SCROTUS at 6th grade level. Or at times, he sinks to the 3rd-grade level. Whichever it is, it is low, one of the lowest in our history. And I submit that this low-complexity by itself can account for his appeal to his base. In general, however, most recent Presidents have had low-level speech, between 6th and 7th grades, as Carnegie-Mellon researchers have discovered.  There is much more to SCROTUS's language than just the low level of complexity.

When he has a teleprompter in front of him, or a script, he does OK. Mostly OK.  

He sounded pretty darn Presidential when he read his February 28 address to the joint houses of Congress, didn't he? He had a decent speech writer, and he read the words real good. Many of us came away from that speech thinking, "Well, damn! He can sound like a President!"  It was short-lived. 

Even when he has a script, he interjects his own nonsense. And I mean nonsense in the true sense of the word. NON-sense.  

One example. In March, 2017 he interviewed Dr. Peggy Annette Whitson, a record-setting astronaut, and it was painful to watch. He could barely read the script, and his ad-libs were cringe-worthy.

He performed well reading his inaugural speech, I've heard. I haven't been able to bring myself to listen to it, but here it is for reference.

This speech itself has been analyzed front to back. Here is a brief analysis of the inaugural address, which compares it to all 57 other inaugural speeches. SCROTUS's speech is in the running for the simplest speech, which is the trend in modern times, and wins the shortest-sentence category. 

This analysis looks at the use of the language in the inaugural speech to the end of promoting a victim mentality, which goes directly to SCROTUS's frequent fervent appeals to his base.

Here is an annotated version by the New York Times that is more of a socio-political analysis, still interesting, so I include it.

And then there is his spontaneous speech. Train wreck. A train wreck of language. Not even language. There is barely syntax. There are strings of words without much of anything else. I posted before, about his interviews with Time and with the Associated Press. Almost every spontaneous utterance he spouts is unintelligibile.

Here is a clip from the Summer of 2015, right around the time he announced his candidacy.

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Here's the transcript of this "sentence," if you don't care to watch the foul lump of deformity spout his gross concoction of word-like substances:

Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist  and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, 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, OK, 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, do 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 like credentials all the time, because we're a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it's not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it's four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven't figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it's gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians  are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.

If you understand this, please let us know in the comments!

In an earlier blog post I pointed you to the transcript of a couple press interviews, one with Time magazine and one with the Associated Press. Both organizations printed the entire transcript of the interviews, in all their fatuous flapdoodle. 

Here they are again. Read them if you dare. You may feel like you are in a parallel universe after reading them. It's English, and yet..... it's not!

Time Magazine transcript, March 22, 2017

AP Interview transcript, April 23, 2017

If you think it's bad for us native English speakers, you can imagine that his incoherence has been a problem with interpreters. They have bigly difficulty translating SCROTUSese. This article from The Independent describes the mighty struggle that Japanese translators suffer, and the anxiety they feel over sounding "stupid." Hindi translators don't bother translating the whole, but resort to summarizing and offering sound bites. The effect is that it is easier for their readers to understand, and it makes him sound intelligible. Read The Guardian's article for more. Fascinating stuff.

Newsweek also outlined the struggles that translators, particularly Japanese translators, have. The pain is real. 

NPR has a good interview with a Persian interpreter, who described his problems as a SCROTUSese-to-Persian translator.

As alarming as non-sensical he sounds, to us and to foreigners, his base perceives this differently than we do. This article from Scientific American delves into their differing perceptions. His supporters see him as "a straight shooter" who "doesn't mince words." And they are right. He doesn't mince words. He puts them in his VitaMix and turns the dial to 11. 

This analysis from ThinkProgress also opines that his use of language makes him seem more anti-politician, which is what his base likes about him.

"I have the best words." --SCROTUS

So, what about his words? Without an analysis of the whole of his language, we can look at just the words.

Vanity Fair describes an artificial intelligence analysis that compares the Candidate Cheeto's most frequent words with Candidate Clinton's. Interesting read.

Cogito, another artificial intelligence beast, looked at a few different classes of words during his inaugural speech as part of a bigger analysis. Follow their links for more.

Your Dictionary outlines his 20 most used words in a slide show with examples. Here are the 20 most-used words:

Win/winning

Stupid 

Weak 

Loser 

We 

They 

Politcally correct 

Moron 

Smart 

Tough 

Dangerous 

Bad 

Lightweight 

Amazing 

Huge 

Tremendous 

Terrific 

Zero 

Out of control

Sounds like a schoolyard bully to me.

And then....and then.... there's the whole Twitterverse. Oh my goodness, that is a whole bowl of linguistic soup, right there. Not only is Twitter a dialect unto itself (or set of dialects), SCROTUS's reliance on it as his chief method of communicating to the masses is *ahem* unpresidented! And wow! does he mangle things there!

He has gifted us grammar nerds a wonderful treasure trove of bigly gaffes. I've said it again and again to third graders: You, too, can become President! Just have a look. It's enough to make a grammarian covfefe on the spot!

Here's another complication of Twitter gaffes, compiled by Business Insider. And even FAUX News has a list.

Face it, he's an idiot.

(An aside: Just for fun, here is a good link. It archives every single SCROTUS tweet. Beautifully searchable. The TЯUMP Twitter Archive)

All of this brings us to the original article that my friend Karen shared with me, Trump’s Degradation of the Language, when she asked me to blog about his language. He degrades language and makes it superfluous. Lies become alternative facts. The salesman becomes the shyster. The language itself doesn't matter anymore.

SCROTUS's language does not stand on its own, and it's not in a bubble. It is having an impact on our greater language evolution. Language is a leaving, breathing beast, always evolving. SCROTUS's interesting use of language and all the talk of it, is effecting a change in our language. But that's the stuff of another blog post. Part II to come. 

(sorry, Karen, Part II may have been what you were after!)

In the end, all of this may all simply be the reflection of a man falling down the rabbit hole of dementia. None of it is intentional, and all the analysis in the world doesn't change the fact that his language is not normal. In the least. Not any part of it. All of the reading that I've done for this post -- and I've done a lot, as you have if you clicked through to some of those links -- brings me around to the dementia angle. There is something very wrong with him. I outlined this theory in an earlier post from April, and I'm cemented in my belief that he is suffering from dementia. Or rather, we are all suffering from his dementia. Other writers are bringing this issue to light. Statnews recently published an excellent analysis and comparison.

If it's true, it could go very bad. We're in real trouble. 

Thanks for reading. Keep up the Resistance!