An Entertaining NYTimes Piece on President Trump’s Often Odd Tweeting of the English Language

From an August 31 New Y0rk Times piece, by Sarah Lyall, titled “Trump’s Twitter War on Spelling”:

. . .After he has spent nearly three years in office, Mr. Trump’s critics ask, why does he remain intent not only on making egregious errors, but also on deliberately failing to correct them? Leaving aside its splenetic tone and in-your-face ad hominem attacks, knee-jerk defensiveness and ugly, dog-whistle language, why is so much of the direct communication from the president to the world heaving with bad grammar, bad spelling, bizarre punctuation, muddy diction and inexplicable random capitalization?. . .

The Democrats hope that in 2020 the country will elect a new tweeter in chief, perhaps even one who knows how to spell. But Mr. Trump’s Twitter style has served him well with supporters who applaud his maverick resistance to rules. So far, no other politician has managed to pull off his sui generis mix of pugnacious content and my-way-or-the-highway approach to English composition.

“He is not writing standard English the way you and I would do it, but he’s clearly an effective communicator and it’s clearly working,” said Peter Sokolowski, a lexicographer and the editor at large at Merriam-Webster. “A lack of respect for convention is what his supporters like about him, and his rhetoric does seem to ring true with his persona and his character.”. . .

Indeed, rather than being embarrassed, the president seems to be proud of his mistakes — or even to believe that because he has committed them, they are not mistakes at all. This makes him a poor role model, said the lexicographer and writer Kory Stamper. “After he won the election and his writing style came under scrutiny, people said that once he took office, he would rise to the occasion,” she said. “But you can see that some of the things he does have gotten worse, like the rampant capitalization of weird words.”. . .

A report last year [in New York magazine] said that members of the president’s staff sometimes deliberately add errors to the tweets they ghostwrite for him, to make them seem authentically presidential. . . .

Mr. Trump’s language philosophy brings to mind the approach of Humpty Dumpty, the giant bloviating egg in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass.” When Alice questions his claim that (among other things) “glory” means “a good knock-down argument” Humpty declares that when he uses a word, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”. . .

Comments

  1. John H. Corcoran Jr says

    It is possible, like so many heavyweight thinkers these days, Trump prefers isolation and silence when flexing the muscles of his grey matter. Thus like other modern day philosophers he is likely to have a hermetically sealed isolation booth constructed for just such purpose.

    If it was a government project–you don’t expect the cheap bastard to pay for it himself do you?–an error, savings, or mistep may have crept into the design. Like say, a defective oxygen line.

    Any other issues need clarification, or problems resolved, remember, my help line is always manned.

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