Language Log

Almost a decade ago, Matt Hutson asked me whether "there are underlying personality differences between people who punctuate (litter?) their speech with 'you know' versus those who use 'I mean' more frequently" ("I mean, you know", 8/19/2007). I wasn't able to offer any insight into personality associations, but looking in the LDC conversational speech corpus, I did find some associations with age, education, and gender.

Recently I've been transcribing some political speeches and interviews, and I've noticed that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are rather polarized on this dimension.

The controversial words about the Second Amendment that Donald Trump uttered at a rally in North Carolina yesterday are as follows:

Hillary wants to abolish
— essentially abolish —
the Second Amendment.
By the way,
if she gets to pick her judges… [long pause]
Nothing you can do, folks. [long pause]
Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know.

Trump defenders are denying that this was an oblique encouragement to gun-possessing supporters to shoot Mrs Clinton. His own defense is that he was suggesting people should go to the polls and vote. Utter bullshit. This is perhaps Trump's most outrageous remark yet. He couldn't have blown the dog whistle much louder without being in danger of arrest for encouraging violence.

The three key linguistic points are (1) the reference of the noun phrase "the Second Amendment people", (2) the meaning of the modal adjunct "maybe", and (3) the function of the "I don't know" on the end.

Matthew Cooper, "Full text of Donald Trump's prepared remarks to the Detroit Economic Club", Newsweek 8/8/2016:

Addressing the Detroit Economic Club is a mainstay for presidential candidates, and Donald Trump put a unique stamp on the event Monday. No Republican nominee in decades has given such a blistering critique of free trade and none has been met by so many protesters. (Trump opponents peppered his speech with shouts.) At one point, the mogul seemed to make a verbal slip, substituting the word “titties” for “cities.”

Here is a photograph of some Chinese anti-American protesters from "The complete guide to China’s propaganda videos blaming the West for almost everything", by Zheping Huang, Quartz (8/8/16):

PolitiFact recently took up the case of a Donald Trump campaign video that shows Hillary Clinton apparently announcing her intention to raise middle class taxes (Linda Qiu, "Donald Trump wrongly says Hillary Clinton wants to raise taxes on the middle class", PolitiFact 8/5/2016). The crux of the matter is this passage.

I’m telling you right now,
we’re going to write fairer rules for the middle class,
and we aren't going to raise taxes on the middle class.

The Trump video subtitled it this way:

Donald Trump supporter Sean O'Loughlin sent out a pro-Trump press release ("Dear America") with this bizarre passage:

When people on the news call Donald Trump a racist, I find that statement difficult to believe. Like myself, Donald Trump is a life-long New Yorker. Donald Trump lives, works, eats and employs people of all races and religions.

Maintaining the theme of civility in this year's political campaigning, "Billionaire Mark Cuban rips Trump", CNN 7/31/2016:

You know what we call a person like that,
you know, the screamers, the yellers, the people who try to intimidate you?
You know what we call a person like that in Pittsburgh?
A jagoff!
Is there any bigger jagoff in the world than Donald Trump?

A few linguistic and interactional clues to Donald Trump's motivations, in his politically disastrous back-and-forth with Ghazala and Khizr Khan, can perhaps be found in some examples of his use of the word vicious:

I was viciously attacked by Mr. Khan at the Democratic Convention. Am I not allowed to respond? Hillary voted for the Iraq war, not me!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 31, 2016

Joe Heller's cartoon for 7/29/2016:

One of Donald Trump's characteristic rhetorical devices is praeteritio ("passing over"), where the speaker says something by saying they're not going to say it. An especially nice specimen came up in a rally in Iowa on Thursday:

"Trump Jr. Says Obama Lifted Phrase From His RNC Speech", NBC News 7/28/2016:

Donald Trump Jr. suggested Thursday that Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia Wednesday night lifted a line from his Republican National Convention remarks, pointing out that both addresses contained the line "That's not the America I know."

I'm honored that POTUS would plagiarize a line from my speech last week. Where's the outrage? #DemsInPhilly https://t.co/sFQ7fblpLh

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 28, 2016

But as I pointed out in a post back in July of 2004), George W. Bush used the phrase "That is not the America I know" at least six times in 2001-2002.

Ben Mathis-Lilley, "Joe Biden Brings House Down at DNC With Raging Fireball of a Speech Highlighted by Use of Word 'Malarkey'", Slate 7/27/2016. Here's the passage:

According to Merriam-Webster's Trend Watch,

Malarkey rose to the top of our look-ups on the evening of July 27th, 2016, after Vice-President Joseph Biden used the word in a speech at the Democratic National Convention.

“He is trying to tell us he cares about the middle class. Give me a break. That is a bunch of malarkey.” —Joe Biden, quoted on Politico.com, 27 July 2016

Following up on Tim Kaine's mocking imitation of Donald Trump's phrase "believe me", CNN put up a comparison:

"Believe me." Tim Kaine's impression of Donald Trump vs. the mogul himself https://t.co/WpV3EgxtQz #DemsInPhilly https://t.co/q9ar1abkZW

— CNN (@CNN) July 28, 2016