Trump’s language, Trump’s thought
John McWhorter has written an article for the Atlantic entitled: “Trump’s Typos Reveal His Lack of Fitness for the Presidency: They suggest not just inadequate manners or polish, but inadequate thought.”
Oh, really?
The conviction that grammar and/or spelling errors reflect deficits in thinking is something I’ve read before, usually stated by people who are in the business of writing and proud of it. McWhorter himself is full of expertise on that subject, and has much about which to be proud:
[He] is an American academic and linguist who is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he teaches linguistics, American studies, philosophy, and music history. He is the author of a number of books on language and on race relations. His research specializes on how creole languages form, and how language grammars change as the result of sociohistorical phenomena.
McWhorter writes:
The president of the United States has many faults, but let’s not ignore this one: He cannot write sentences. If a tree falls in a forrest and no one is there to hear it … wait: Pretty much all of you noticed that mistake, right? Yet Wednesday morning, the president did not; he released a tweet referring to “forrest fires” twice, as if these fires were set by Mr. Gump.
But that example McWhorter gives of Trump’s inability to write sentences is nothing of the sort. It’s a spelling error. And, not to get too nitpicky about it (oh, let’s), but someone who actually wanted to express the thought that forest fires were set by Forrest Gump would be capitalizing the word, as in “Forrest fires.”
McWhorter continues:
Trump’s serial misuse of public language is one of many shortcomings that betray his lack of fitness for the presidency.
McWhorter goes on to cite examples of Trump’s supposed “misuse” (whatever that means in this context) of “public language,” a misuse that goes beyond spelling errors into other areas of written and verbal expression. McWhorter contends these are examples of lack of fitness for the presidency. They typically seem to be instances in which Trump uses simple words and/or repetitive phrases to express thoughts that McWhorter would prefer were explained in more complex ways. Here’s an example [emphasis mine]:
For example, Trump is given to talking about “doing” things when most would choose a more specific verb. Last summer, Trump bragged of having told Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May “how to do Brexit.” “Do” it? Like “doing” Cats, or shots? Mere do does rather gracelessly drag the statement down to the cold, hard pavement. Trump also hopes he can “do” a wall in Mexico: “That’s 13,000 miles,” he said. “Here, we actually need 1,000 because we have natural barriers. So we need 1,000. We can do a wall. We’re going to have a big, fat, beautiful door right in the middle of the wall.”
Trump’s love of “doing” might indicate his professed expertise in deal making. One does—colloquially, at least—“do” a deal, and Trump supposes that Brexit and the border wall will result from “dealing.” But this very assumption reflects an inability to grapple with the complexities of state matters. He simply cannot accept—cannot grasp—that international diplomacy could possibly require more subtlety than a real-estate transaction. His phrasing suggests someone taking in nothing from the urgent happenings around him, someone refusing to read his briefs or anything else.
In that passage, how does McWhorter comes to the conclusion I bolded? It’s quite a leap, and a completely unproven—and IMHO unjustified—one. All from the use of the word “do”? I would guess that McWhorter, for all his word-expertise, knows very little about both large real estate deals and “the complexities of state matters,” as well as the mind of Donald Trump. Let’s put it this way: I’d rather Trump were “doing” such deals than any professor of linguistics at Columbia or elsewhere.
McWhorter does concede that:
One must not automatically equate sloppy spelling with sloppy thinking. Quite a few admired writers are not great spellers before editing.
Not just writers, either. Actually, quite a few thinkers (see this), founders, and statesmen couldn’t spell. McWhorter tries to backtrack and say that well, it’s not so much Trump’s inability to spell as his refusal to correct his spelling before publishing to the world: “Such negligence is of a piece with Trump’s general disregard of norms, details, and accuracy.” McWhorter has made his own error there, because if he acknowledges that spelling errors themselves are not evidence of lack of thought, then why did he spend several previous paragraphs at least appearing to suggest that?
So, why does Trump put out so many tweets with misspellings and capitalizations and the like? My hunch is that he is actively trying to annoy academics and others who care about such niceties, and that this is a product of thought on Trump’s part. There is no question in my mind that he is quite aware of things such as spell check, and that he could use aides to proofread his work if he choose. But I don’t think he omits that step through carelessness; I think it’s a way for him to infuriate those he wishes to anger, and to say to the rest of the people hey, I’m a deplorable too.
Trump can speak quite differently, and not just in his prepared speeches. Anyone who listens to his press conferences or interviews can see him shifting back and forth between more simple and more complex speech. No, he never sounds eloquent (except in a Yogi Berra sort of way) or professorial, but why would that be a drawback? I don’t ask those things of a president (although I rather like them), nor do I value those things if what that president is saying so smoothly is either doubletalk or something with which I disagree.
Trump somehow manages to get his message across, loud and clear. McWhorter may not like the message; fine. Then criticize the message. Don’t draw unwarranted and unproven conclusions from the form the message takes.
[NOTE: Denver Dyslexia Awareness has a list of US presidents purported to have been dyslexic, and adds: “Although dyslexics may struggle with reading, writing, and/or spelling and even math, many dyslexics excel in their outside the box thinking, vision, leadership, and oral skills and ability to lead and inspire.”
Hmmm.]
I know it was either Thomas Jefferson, or Mark Twain, who said he would be embarrassed to only know one way to spell a word. I agree with him.
Trump in a nutshell:
Reporter: “Mr. President, congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez called you a racist”
President Trump: “Who did?”
Reporter: “Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez”
President Trump: “Who cares?”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/01/president-trump-shrugs-off-attacks-by-ocasio-cortez-who-cares-video/
I have a great deal of admiration for good spelling and grammar, but some of the smartest people I know type like they’ve been blindfolded and someone else (also blindfolded) is trying to describe to them where each key on the keyboard is located. The written word is not everybody’s best medium.
Granted, I do think this is something that will mostly strike people according to their political party… if it had been Obama tweeting like that while mocking conservatives, I’m sure I would have been irritated and, yes, disdainful. Although his intelligence and academic prowess were traits that were much-talked-up by his party, whereas Trump’s tweets are more in line with his used-car-salesman image.
It’s interesting that no hand written letters of his have surfaced, like say to an old girlfriend. I mean, he WAS alive when people routinely wrote letters.
I’d bet McWhorter $100 at 5-1 that he can’t dig a straight 10′ ditch.
So “Frasier” McWhorter deigns to critize the President for his spelling. Who cares? IMO it has always been a sign of Progressives to focus on the superficial rather than the meaningful; what car one drives, what credentials one holds, does one wear white after Labor day, all of these overt signs of status rather than meaningful expressions of dignity and class.
I don’t know John McWhorter, but judging from his pecksniffian essay I half-suspect my first sentence might be an insult to Frasier Crane.
There was an business article from 20 or 25 years ago where someone analyzed the basic backgrounds of CEOs of mid to large Swiss corporations. They discovered that at least 50% did not have higher than a high school education.
Switzerland is very economically successful on a per capita basis and beats the U.S. on many metrics. I’m not sure what their spelling skills would be, given the 4 official languages spoken there.
______
Of course, once one gets beyond the fact that McWhorter is speaking from inside his wheelhouse, it’s all just ludicrous. Just look at Obama’s speaking record when he went off script and off teleprompter. And looking at Obama’s academic record,… Oh wait, we can’t look at that can we? But he did have a -D after his name so he must be utterly brilliant.
I suspect Trump’s tweets are a lot like “Spiderman banter”, where Spidey is talking while he’s fighting and his jokes & insults are actually effective at enraging his villainous opponent who makes a rage induced mistake.
I read Trump’s tweets. I like them. I find when I write comments I often make mistakes, too (and I’m Stanford educated. Ha, so what?).
McWhorter’s focus on language betrays a failure to criticize results (lowest unemployment, getting out of wars, talking with N. Korea, etc), because Trump’s results are so good. It’s also a failure to list promises unkept, since it looks like Trump is trying to keep his promises.
Both results and promises kept are far, far better than under Obama.
So he doesn’t like Trump’s tweets.
Big deal.
I’ll go read some more Trump, direct, rather than the (sadly) lowered Atlantic which too often is just elitist Trump-hate.
Neo, the 5 min to edit is also great to reduce the mistakes, and maybe clarify who is the “he” when there are too many.
I’m not so sure his typos are deliberate — see “Pore or pour? Trump tweet corrects example of poor spelling” and “Trump posts, then corrects, tweet praising his ‘consensual’ presidency”
I notice typos and incorrectly spelled words. I also am afflicted with a tendency to make certain mistakes when typing which are immediately evident when re-reading. Therefore I am painfully aware of the fact that typing quickly and not re-reading what you’ve typed carefully can result in painful typos, even if you know better than to make the mistakes in question. Thus, I try not to be an obnoxious, priggish grammar and spelling Nazi in most circumstances and I tend to have a negative impression of people who are more interested in pretending to be editors than considering the content and context of the words and writer.
All that said, I also would point out that there are different kinds of intelligence. You can be the best editor that ever walked the planet but be completely lacking in other types of intelligence that can be equally, or often more, important. Street smarts and people smarts come to mind as relevant types of intelligence that are important for leaders, which come from aptitude and experience, never a book.
Is Trump possessing of godlike non-book skills? Maybe, maybe not. But I have yet to meet anyone who never left college that has real-world street smarts or knows people from a sufficiently varied pool to have what I would call people smarts. I trust Trump more than a random college professor to navigate a real-world transaction of any type, and one thing I do know that Trump has experience with is construction in this and other nations.
Althouse also takes on McWhorter this morning:
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-president-of-united-states-has-many.html
Ann:
Trump’s spelling errors are pointed out over and over and he very rarely corrects them.
Nor did I say that his spelling errors themselves are intentional. I think he truly is somewhat dyslexic. But he doesn’t care, and he doesn’t use spell check to correct not because he doesn’t know it exists but because he knows the errors irritate just the right people.
And his choice of simpler words rather than more complex ones is mostly a choice and partly just his action-oriented style.
I bet almost everyone here has heard the ‘Trump said —- which shows what an idiot he is’.
Mine came just before the election when my very long time friend got huffy when he stated as proof, and I disagreed with him, that because Trump didn’t know the capital of Cambodia he’s an idiot.
I’ve come to the conclusion that there are a lot of college educated folks who equate talking in a certain way with intelligence, and if you don’t talk that way you must be stupid.
Does he ignore the red line under the misspelled word before he hits “send”?
Remember how Bush II was an idjit and uneducated because he couldn’t pronounce certain words? My best friends wife (who happens to be British and a College Professor) made such a comment. My rejoinder was that I too have difficulty in pronouncing words and I have a MA in History (when History was really taught) so was I too uneducated? That shut her up. But I really do like her and my friend and I are still best friends.
Neo said,
“My hunch is that he is actively trying to annoy academics and others who care about such niceties, and that this is a product of thought on Trump’s part.”
I think the ‘forrest’ X 2 is a good indicator of that.
M Williams,
Was your friend able to note the capital of Cambodia without the aid of the people making fun of the president? And could that friend pronounce it correctly?
I am enjoying djt as POTUS. He annoys all the right people by living in their fevered brains 24/7. And, I think he knows exactly what he is doing. We can call him the do president.
Those first 400 people in the phone book probably make lotsa spelling errors, too.
—– —– —– —– —–
Reference . . .
“I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”
– William F. Buckley, Jr.
How low will they go?
I find that I make a lot of errors when composing on a computer. I usually, not always, go back and proof my efforts; or use the blessed edit function available on certain web sites. But, then, I do not have a multitude of really serious issues vying for my attention. I doubt that McWhorter does either. He would do better to lecture his peers on the importance of teaching their students to express themselves succinctly; because in that, they are failing miserably.
You may be right about Trump having a mild dyslexia, Neo.
On the other hand, I am fairly compulsive about correct language and spelling. Nonetheless, and more so on my phone than on the computer, I’ll spell something, hit “send,” and find that what I sent is misspelled, or worse, doesn’t make any sense at all. This is often caused by the iPhone’s autocorrect function. I enter exactly what I want and the phone changes it.
And I am amused at what autocorrect chooses and refuses to use. My daughter lives in the DC metroplex. During football season, we often exchange messages about the Washington pro football team. My iPhone absolutely refuses to “learn” the team name. I have to type “Redskins” and then select it.
So – from Russian patsy to bad speller.
That’s it? That’s all they got?
Ryan,
Is your first name Paul?
You might find this interesting. Mr. Mitchell used to publish The Underground Grammarian and made fun of the schools.
https://sourcetext.com/grammarian/
I’m reasonably well educated, and a reasonably good speller. I’m also a terrible typist (I had to make three corrections to this post before sending it).
Mistyping something may indicate ignorance, but it may just indicate poor typing skills.
oldflyer, above at 7:43 p.m.: Very well said. :>))
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A lot of the mistakes in spelling are just typographical errors. But to rely on a “spell-checker” and blindly accept its “corrections” only worsens the problem. They can be somewhat helpful if they only flag whatever word is not in their vocabularies, but I would never, ever let them “auto-correct.”
Also, in writing (whether on the keyboard or even, increasingly, in longhand) I often find myself on autopilot, so to speak. Writing “here” when I meant to right* “hear,” and also vice-versa. Or as I did in a 6th-grade spelling test around 65 years ago, being so wrapped up in my penmanship that I wrote “hell,” leaving off the final “o.” (It was a small class in a small town, and I’d known the teacher nearly all my life since we went to the same church; her daughter was a year younger than I. She brought my paper back to me and with a look of horrified amusement, she pointed to my gaffe and said — maybe said nothing, the look having been enough; I don’t recall. *ooh, how embarrassing!*)
Times were different then, and “Hell” was still a swear word. Only to be uttered by adult males, and then not in mixed company….
*Note: “right” instead of “write.” I decided to leave it in as a perfect example of this kind of mistake, made entirely out of concentration on the substance of the sentence rather than pondering each keystroke before making it….
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So much for spelling mistakes. There are also abundant grammatical mistakes, made not only in ignorance or from having been immersed in bad grammar both spoken and written for too long.
Also, many of my own grammatical errors come from my being distracted by thinking about exactly what I want to say, rather than on my grammar. But of course that’s one reason why we have first drafts.
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And then there are the errors that appear as incomprehensible leaps of thought. I get so caught up in trying to say what I want to say that I forget where I am in the sentence or the paragraph currently under construction. I leave out a word, or a descriptive phrase, or move on from the first half of one sentence to the second half of what ought to have been a second sentence. Inevitably either a subject or a verb or the antecedent of a pronoun — or all three — gets lost in this attempt to get from A to B by the inadvertently shortened route.
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So one tries to go back and proofread carefully. It would be good if one could take a day, or at least several hours, to put one’s mind on something else, so as to have a better chance when proofreading of seeing what one wrote rather than what one thought one was writing. But to do this in writing weblog comments would mean that often, by the time one actually submitted the comment, everyone else might well have moved on.
All this means that I take an unconscionably long time to write a simple note to myself (“Take out garbage tonight!”), let along a Comment aimed at the public.
What a pathetic state of affairs! :>((
Next, following on from the above:
Ray, that’s a very interesting link you gave us; thanks.
I am pretty old-school about Standard English, grammatical English that is, and of course correcting other people’s English in weblog comments is not necessarily the way to endear oneself to all the other commenters — especially the ones being corrected. [There is nothing more embarrassing than making an error in a correction, especially when the original was already quite correct! :>(( ] It can also be seen as bad manners, although happily I find myself on at least one board where some of us are word-mavens who are a bit wont to do it, and mostly take it in good spirits. I am trying to learn to desist, mostly, from acting on the urge, but it’s sometimes difficult.
My argument is that proper English and correct word-usage, while inevitably changing as we go along, facilitate both communication and clear thinking, and therefore we ought to resist the changes as best we can. Don’t change the meaning of a word, first by stretching it into new territory where it isn’t really applicable but seems plausibly used, and then by removing its tail (so to speak) from the old territory altogether. This has happened, for instance, with the word “bigot,” which when I was young was used mostly to mean a hypocrite. Gradually it came to be taken to mean “one who is prejudiced,” originally against some race, but nowadays it seems that one can be “bigotted” against people of a certain creed (meaning religion), or people who engage in certain sexual practices (homosexuals for instance), or any group whom the SJW crowd is entranced with “protecting.”
If we could resist changing the meanings of the words we already have, so that the same word meant the same thing to successive generations, we wouldn’t have as much controversy as we do over, say, the interpretation of various statements and strictures in the Constitution.
And we would also find it easier to think clearly, since it would be easier for us to keep to the meaning of the word in our own heads as we ponder a somewhat abstruse notion.
I’m well aware that such a state of affairs will come sometime after the actual Second Coming, but one can still try to move in the direction of an ideal….
All of this is in preface to my noting that at the site to which Ray links, I found this paper pretty interesting:
https://sourcetext.com/why-good-grammar/
It looks to me like Mr. McWhorter would be among those re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
And with all respect to Mr. Buckley, I would no longer entrust the country to the Boston phone book. Fort Worth, perhaps, or some small town in Texas.
* * *
Kate on January 14, 2019 at 8:03 pm at 8:03 pm said:
…My iPhone absolutely refuses to “learn” the team name. I have to type “Redskins” and then select it.
* * *
I doubt that is an accident.
All our phones are belong to Them.
Julie near Chicago:
I go through the same laborious process that you described here. Proofreading is everything, and it takes a long time.
Neo, I don’t see how you have time to do all that you do. :>(
Julie near Chicago:
A touch of obsessiveness helps.
During the previous Civil War, a Confederate General was advised by a subordinate that a Northern Column was about to attack. And requested instructions. The reply was “Fit Em”. A clear, unambiguous order. Exactly what a soldier wants and needs when it is about to hit the fan. I’ll bet Trump is pretty good at clear unambiguous orders.
The writing in the topic article sounds a lot like how I was taught to write essays in high school (graduated ’05). The presenting of the subject matter, the analysis that sounds so smart, but doesn’t actually mean anything, or was pulled from far left field (type of analysis we did for every book/poem/essay/etc). I would guess the author to be in my age-group.
I am a good speller. I read a heck-ton. I did very well in all my schooling (knowing how to give a teacher/professor what they want gets you far). I don’t think that I have a very high IQ, though. I’ve never taken a test for it, but I don’t think my brain has the puzzle smarts. Spelling =/= smarts or knowledge or experience.
First, it was eating his steak well-done (or was it with ketchup?) – now it’s his spelling. They’ll run with anything that is against Trump. It’s really that simple.