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| 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.
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!
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