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!