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| Linguist John McWhorter |
Brian Williams interviewed linguistics professor John McWorter on the 11th Hour. McWhorter elaborated on Trump’s deficiency as a communicator.
Williams: “What is the linguistics definition of this president?”
McWhorter: “Donald Trump is unadorned. Linguistically, he is unadorned. This is the basics, this is what language was undoubtedly like when it first emerged among people who didn’t have writing and were first getting their verbal sea legs. This is where it started and so in that way as in so many others Donald Trump is an original.”
Williams: “That would mean that education and schooling has had no effect on his use of language. He’s quick to remind us that he went to the best schools.”
McWhorter: “And he learned nothing in them. He speaks like someone who has paid no attention to one of the goals of education, which is refine our natural, inborn proclivities of speech, which are great for casual circumstances, but he uses those same ways of speaking in what most of us used to consider formal and important circumstances.”
Williams: “I think in your line of work they call it a ‘tag’ when something is added at the end of a sentence. The tradition is that often he will tag a sentence with ‘believe me, believe me,’ an enforcer, something he thought was lacking in the original sentence.”
McWhorter: “Um, hmm. It’s that he’s reinforcing ...what we’re always doing is checking to see that the other person understands what we’re saying, that they’re in the same boat that we are, so that’s what ‘you know’ is, that’s what ‘LOL’ is in texting, but once again, he’s not doing it in texting, he’s doing it in formal circumstances. What that means is that he never leaves the realm of the casual when he speaks, which is unlike — even in indigenous societies, where there is no such thing as reading or writing yet, there’s always a high way of talking and a low way of talking; the Chief just doesn’t get up and run his mouth. Ours does.
Great, we have a guy in the most important political office on the planet who communicates worse than an indigenous tribe deep in the jungles of South America.
That's so comforting.
Personally I cannot even bear to listen to Trump for more than a minute or so at a time.
Hearing him reminds of all of those hours spent transcribing Sarah Palin speeches and interviews during which at one point I literally checked to see if my ears had started bleeding.
It is hard to imagine that there are even six American voters who listened to Trump speak and thought, "Well he sounds like the leader we need in this country," much less almost sixty three million of them.
Source http://ift.tt/2i26A8r
