The Trump Road Tour--Arabia, Israel, Europe

[Dill]

(05-23-2017, 03:19 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: Off topic, but I'm wondering how many articles in the social sciences are going to be written about the small hands thing. Every time I see it I think of different angles this can be discussed. None of them are really good for Trump or those that bring it up.

For now, journalists and bloggers have certainly picked up on the limited vocabulary. Some of this devolves into high-falutin name calling, but there are some insights into the relation between nuanced vocabulary and nuanced thought--and how lack of the former might indicate lack of the latter.

"Trump's Trashy "77-Word" Vocabulary Exemplifies Sly Intelligence"
https://www.inverse.com/article/27515-donald-trump-bad-vocabulary

"The Emperor Has No Vocabulary"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-emperor-has-no-vocabulary_us_58a6d469e4b026a89a7a2971
He’s like a Jabberwocky terrorist.

His ability to drown out reason with a steady, pernicious flow of babble and blather effectively demoralizes everyone within earshot. He brandishes nonsense like a flamethrower, basically torching his listeners with an unstoppable barrage of disconcerting and creepy, cryptic crap. It’s why an impressive assemblage of hard-bitten, savvy reporters looked as though they needed a blankie, a ba-ba, a binky and a jumbo-sized bottle of Excedrin by the time he was through.

Trump's Vocabulary
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/4/25/1656205/-Trump-s-Vocabulary
Reading the transcript of Trump’s interview by the Associated Press, I was struck not only by its incoherence but by the paucity of words that Trump seems to have available to him to discuss any subject. By my count, he used the word “great” 36 times in the interview, always in the context of discussing himself or his achievements.  He used “big” or “bigger” or “biggest” a similar number of times, always in the context of his actual or planned accomplishments

"Donald Trump Talks Like a Third-Grader"
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/donald-trump-talks-like-a-third-grader-121340
Donald Trump isn’t a simpleton, he just talks like one. If you were to market Donald Trump’s vocabulary as a toy, it would resemble a small box of Lincoln Logs. Trump resists multisyllabic words and complex, writerly sentence constructions when speaking extemporaneously in a debate, at a news conference or in an interview. He prefers to link short, blocky words into other short, blocky words to create short, blocky sentences that he then stacks into short, blocky paragraphs.

The end result of Trump’s word choice is less the stripped-down prose style of Ernest Hemingway than it is a spontaneous reinvention of Ogden’s Basic English, the pared-down lexicon of 850 words selected by early 20th century linguist/philosopher C.K. Ogden as the bedrock of a new world language. In the August 6th Republican candidates debate, Trump answered the moderators’ questions with linguistic austerity. Run through the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test, his text of responses score at the 4th-grade reading level. For Trump, that’s actually pretty advanced. All the other candidates rated higher, with Ted Cruz earning 9th-grade status. Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, and Scott Walker scored at the 8th-grade level. John Kasich, the next-lowest after Trump, got a 5th-grade score.

"Trump’s Tremendous Vocabulary"
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/toni-hargis/donald-trump-vocab_b_14935538.html

As a reminder of how political discourse has degenerated over the life of the Republic, I include two sentences written by an earlier president. What impresses is not so much the vocabulary as the ability to hold an architecture of complex ideas together in one thought while expressing it in the linear form of a grammatically correct sentence:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Yes, politicians used to talk like that--and didn't use speech writers.