Language Log

Jesse Ventura has had a successful career as a pro wrestler, actor, and politician — all largely built on the foundations of his mastery of pro wrestling rhetoric.  And recent events have brought him back into the public eye. His Jan. 8 interview on the Minneapolis Fox News channel got 2.7 million likes and more than 47 thousand comments on TikTok, lots of play on other news-ish outlets, 295k views and more than 7400 comments on YouTube,  and 3.7 million views and more than 1400 comments on X.

See "The art of the promo" (10/31/2020) for some background on this rhetorical style, including its role in Donald Trump's career. And if you haven't listened to Ventura's interview, you should do so as background for this post.

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-seventy-sixth issue:

“The Many Voices of Silence: The Diverse Theories of the Ineffable Dao in the Zhuangzi,” by Ming SUN.

Above is the cover of John DeFrancis's magnum opus, Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1989).  It has a stunning illustration consisting of the phonetic representation of the first six words of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address transcribed as follows: acoustic wave graph of the voice of William S.-Y. Wang, IPA, roman letters, Cyrillic, devanagari, hangul, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Arabic, katakana, Yi (Lolo, Nuosu, etc.), cuneiform, and sinographs (a fuller version of the cover illustration may be found on the frontispiece [facing the title page] and there is a generous explanation on pp. 248-251).

Reading PRC articles, they strike me as mostly propagandistic hype and rhetoric, but very little substance.  Simon Cox recognizes that in his "China’s inscrutable economic policy","Drum Tower", Eonomist:

F.R. Leavis, an English-literature don, used to complain about something he called “adjectival insistence”. He was thinking of Joseph Conrad, who was a bit too fond of words like inscrutable, implacable and unspeakable. The effect, Leavis said, was not to magnify but to muffle.

Leavis’s complaint came to my mind recently when I was parsing the latest official statements on China’s economic policy for an article about the tasks policymakers face in the year ahead. The country’s rulers have woken up to the fact that the economy needs help. Many businesses lack consumers and consumers lack confidence. Prices are flat or falling.

Sarah Posner on Bluesky, linking to a kamalahq tweet and a kamalahq Instagram post:

In the thread below: a completely rambling, unhinged, incomprehensible quote from Trump at his Flint town hall with Sarah Huckabee Sanders that the Harris campaign distributed, then news headlines about same event.

Where is all the coverage that Trump is old and can't speak a coherent sentence?

I've been defending Donald Trump against similar accusations since my exchange with Geoff Pullum in 2015 — "Trump's aphasia" vs. "Trump's eloquence". Has anything changed?

My debate analysis for The Economist included these charts:
:

Following up on "Type-token plots in The Economist" (9/6/2024), I lost some sleep last night doing some analyses of the presidential debate, which I shared with writers at The Economist to be published as "An alternative look at the Trump-Harris debate, in five charts",  9/11/2024. They lead with another type-token graph:

According to Wikipedia, word salad

is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases", most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The name schizophasia is used in particular to describe the confused language that may be evident in schizophrenia. The words may or may not be grammatically correct, but they are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them. The term is often used in psychiatry as well as in theoretical linguistics to describe a type of grammatical acceptability judgement by native speakers, and in computer programming to describe textual randomization.

The phrase {word salad} has become increasingly common recently in the popular press, most often as an insulting description of Donald Trump's spontaneous speech. See for example Sahil Kapur and Peter Nicholas, "'Incoherent word salad': Trump stumbles when asked how he'd tackle child care", NBC News 9/6/2024.

Justin Weinberg, "Analytic Philosophy's Best Unintentional (?) Self-Parodying", Daily Nous 9/6/2024:

“Someone, let’s say a baby, is born; his parents call him by a certain name.”

That line–recently circulated on social media by Eric Winsberg (South Florida / Cambridge) as “the funniest sentence in the history of philosophy”—is from Saul Kripke‘s Naming and Necessity.

I’m not sure its the funniest sentence in the history of philosophy, but it is pure poetry.

From "The Harris-Trump debate will be a clash of speaking styles", The Economist 9/6/2024:

Shawn McCreesh, "Meandering? Off-Script? Trump Insists His ‘Weave’ Is Oratorical Genius." NYT 9/1/2024:

For weeks, former President Donald J. Trump’s advisers have urged him to be more disciplined and to stop straying off-message.

But on Friday, while speaking at a rally in Johnstown, Pa., Mr. Trump insisted that his oratory is not a campaign distraction but rather a rhetorical triumph.

“You know, I do the weave,” he said. “You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”

Most rhetorical devices have classical Greek names, arriving in English through Latin and French: analepsis, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, … But there are some common cases, like personification, where the English word is entirely Latinate, although the Greeks certainly used knew and used the technique. The OED's etymology is "Formed within English, by derivation", and the earliest OED citation is from 1728.

Like some others, I have an (empirically unsupported) impression that features of Donald Trump's speaking style have changed recently. I first noticed this in listening to his 8/8/2024 press conference in Mar-a-lago — which seems rather different from e.g. his 7/21/2015 rally speech in Sun City., or the many other samples in "Past posts on Donald Trump's rhetoric", 1/5/2024.

At some point before long, I'll provide some numbers to support or undermine this impression. Meanwhile, the comments section is open for your reactions.