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There are many language lovers and grammar buffs on Pricescope. I think that even for those like redwood, alhough she she does not like Charles M Blow and his "opinion pieces", this will make interesting, provocative reading. I am looking forward to discussing it!
Here is an excerpt. this is from "The New York Times".
"One of the more pernicious and insidious effects of the Donald Trump regime may well be the damage he does to language itself.
Trumpian language is a thing unto itself: some manner of sophistry peppered with superlatives. It is a way of speech that defies the Reed-Kellogg sentence diagram. It is a jumble of incomplete thoughts stitched together with arrogance and ignorance.
America is suffering under the tyranny of gibberish spouted by the lord of his faithful 46 percent.
As researchers at Carnegie Mellon pointed out last spring, presidential candidates in general use 'words and grammar typical of students in grades 6-8, though Donald Trump tends to lag behind the others.' Indeed, among the presidents in the university’s analysis, Trump’s vocabulary usage was the lowest and his grammatical usage was only better than one president: George W. Bush.
Trump’s employment of reduced rhetoric is not without precedent and is in fact a well-documented tool of history’s strongmen.
As New York Times C.E.O. Mark Thompson noted about one of Trump’s speeches in his 2016 book, 'Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics?': 'The super-short sentences emphasize certainty and determination, build up layer upon layer, like bricks in a wall themselves, toward a conclusion and an emotional climax. It’s a style that students of rhetoric call parataxis. This is the way generals and dictators have always spoken to distinguish themselves from the caviling civilians they mean to sweep aside.'
Thompson also notes that 'Trump’s appeal as a presidential candidate depends significantly on the belief that he is a truth-teller who will have nothing to do with the conventional language of politics,' warning that:
'We shouldn’t confuse anti-rhetorical "truth telling" with actually telling the truth. One of the advantages of this positioning is that once listeners are convinced that you’re not trying to deceive them in the manner of a regular politician, they may switch off the critical faculties they usually apply to political speech and forgive you any amount of exaggeration, contradiction, or offensiveness. And if establishment rivals or the media criticize you, your supporters may dismiss that as spin.'
Here is the great danger: Many people expect a political lie to sound slick, to be delivered by intellectual elites spouting $5 words. A clumsy, folksy lie delivered by a shyster using broken English reads as truth.
It is an upside-down world in which easy lies sound more true than hard facts."
Link...https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/...version=Full®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article
Here is an excerpt. this is from "The New York Times".
"One of the more pernicious and insidious effects of the Donald Trump regime may well be the damage he does to language itself.
Trumpian language is a thing unto itself: some manner of sophistry peppered with superlatives. It is a way of speech that defies the Reed-Kellogg sentence diagram. It is a jumble of incomplete thoughts stitched together with arrogance and ignorance.
America is suffering under the tyranny of gibberish spouted by the lord of his faithful 46 percent.
As researchers at Carnegie Mellon pointed out last spring, presidential candidates in general use 'words and grammar typical of students in grades 6-8, though Donald Trump tends to lag behind the others.' Indeed, among the presidents in the university’s analysis, Trump’s vocabulary usage was the lowest and his grammatical usage was only better than one president: George W. Bush.
Trump’s employment of reduced rhetoric is not without precedent and is in fact a well-documented tool of history’s strongmen.
As New York Times C.E.O. Mark Thompson noted about one of Trump’s speeches in his 2016 book, 'Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics?': 'The super-short sentences emphasize certainty and determination, build up layer upon layer, like bricks in a wall themselves, toward a conclusion and an emotional climax. It’s a style that students of rhetoric call parataxis. This is the way generals and dictators have always spoken to distinguish themselves from the caviling civilians they mean to sweep aside.'
Thompson also notes that 'Trump’s appeal as a presidential candidate depends significantly on the belief that he is a truth-teller who will have nothing to do with the conventional language of politics,' warning that:
'We shouldn’t confuse anti-rhetorical "truth telling" with actually telling the truth. One of the advantages of this positioning is that once listeners are convinced that you’re not trying to deceive them in the manner of a regular politician, they may switch off the critical faculties they usually apply to political speech and forgive you any amount of exaggeration, contradiction, or offensiveness. And if establishment rivals or the media criticize you, your supporters may dismiss that as spin.'
Here is the great danger: Many people expect a political lie to sound slick, to be delivered by intellectual elites spouting $5 words. A clumsy, folksy lie delivered by a shyster using broken English reads as truth.
It is an upside-down world in which easy lies sound more true than hard facts."
Link...https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/...version=Full®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article
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Which brings to mind a problem I have noticed since last year. My verbal skills are getting very rusty with DH and DS gone most of the day because my horses and dogs do nothing to contribute to a conversation. This has become a problem that must be rectified quickly by more volunteering or a part time job. My son has actually noticed the degradation and once in awhile says "Think, Key, Speak" when it takes me a moment to get my words out, much to my chagrin.
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