"Word salad"

« previous post | next post »

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.

The examples focus on Trump's habit of stringing together a sequence of fragments and parentheticals, while hopping around among semi-related topics. As I wrote in "Trump's eloquence" (8/5/2015), this to some extent (mis-)represents "the apparent incoherence of much transcribed extemporized speech, even when the same material is completely comprehensible and even eloquent in audio or audio-visual form". And in many of the examples discussed in my (too many) "Past posts on Donald Trump's rhetoric", the material is indeed "comprehensible and even eloquent" in spoken form.

Sometimes, as in the much-discussed child-care Q&A, the sequence of fragments includes some puzzling bits. But even there, the women who asked the question, Reshma Saujani, got a clear message from Trump's answer, although it was not a message that she liked.

FWIW, here's the full audio of her question, taken from this recording of the New York Economic Club session:

Here's the full audio of Trump's answer:

For a complete transcript of that answer, and a funny but accurate comment on how the NYT describes such content, see Alexandra Petri, "The Wonderful Trump Headline Machine", WaPo 9/6/2024.

But getting to my point, here's Reshma Saujani's evaluation of Trump's answer, from a CNN interview with Jake Tapper on 9/6/2024:

Jake Tapper: With us now is uh Reshma Saujani. She asked the question yesterday. She's a member of the Economic Club of New York's board of trustees. I don't know if you watched the debate in June, but I tried three times to get him to answer that question, you tried a fourth — did you get anything out of that?

Reshma Saujani: Kinda. I- I may have done a little bit more than you did, because he did answer the question. And what he told us is that child care expens- expenses are no big deal. The fact that you're drowning in debt because of them — sorry, but not sorry. And he also told us that "no, I don't have any ideas or proposals or legislation". And it's insulting. And it's insulting to parent who are constantly having to choose between funding their day care and feeding their kids. And the thing is, is like if you don't have a plan to solve child care, you are not fit to be president.

So Trump's answer included a few confusing fragments, but it was absolutely not "word salad", in the sense of words that "may or may not be grammatically correct, but […] are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them".

By the laws of bothsiderism, the press also often uses the phrase "word salad" with reference to Kamala Harris — and the examples are even further from the original meaning of the term, focusing on her use of slogans (sometimes described as catch-phrases), ordinary spontaneous-speech syntax, and so on.

But maybe over-use of the term "word salad" goes back to its origins in the 19th century. The OED's earliest citation is from Granville Stanley Hall, Adolescence: its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education (1904):

Youth normally comes into a new attitude toward speech at puberty. The vocabulary is enlarged; meanings are re-adjusted; words seem different; there is always a new speech consciousness: interest in new terms shows that in some cases we have loquacity which becomes almost verbigeration; diaries and letters, and even stories and treatises are scribbled at great length. We often observe, too, an inverse ratio between thought and speech, so that as the former becomes scanty and indefinite the stream of words flows more copiously and smoothly; and conversely, as meanings deepen the vocabulary becomes more select and the lapse of speech and pen more restrained. In other normal types the mass of new inner experiences of thought, motive, and sentiment prompt concealment and reticence, and the subject becomes dumb-bound, silent, and perhaps seems to brood, or the range of expression is very confined and narrow. Both these tendencies have asylum out-crops in Forel’s “word-salad” or Krafft-Ebing’s “word- husks” on the one hand, or in mumbling and taciturnity, even speechlessness, on the other.

That's Auguste-Henri Forel, who would have used the French phrase "salade de mots". A search for that term confirms the translation, and also gets us to a StackExchange answer, which links to an 1895 publication that draws an ironic parallel between word-invention by psychotics and Forel's creation of the "word salad" term:

The earliest attestation I can find ascribes the origin to Forel's wortsalat, as translated by Kraepelin to 'wordsalad'. This appears in The Medical Standard of 1895, recounting events from the May, 1894 meeting of the Association of German Alienists and Neurologists, where "Kraepelin of Heidelberg described a 'peculiar group of insane patients,' who, among 'other distressing symptoms,' exhibited as 'the most striking phenomenon' a tendency to the coinage of new words":

 



23 Comments »

  1. bks said,

    September 9, 2024 @ 9:54 am

    I am just a poor boy, though my story's seldom told
    I have squandered my resistance for a pocketful of mumbles
    Such are promises
    All lies and jest
    Still a man hears what he wants to hear
    And disregards the rest, hmm

    (The Boxer, Paul Simon, 1969)

  2. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 9, 2024 @ 10:05 am

    By 1914 it was a common enough term in the relevant technical-jargon variety of American English to make the cut for the 3d edition of Thomas Lathrop Stedman's "A Practical Medical Dictionary," which defines it as "A term applied by Forel to the jumble of meaningless words uttered by a patient suffering from catatonia." Presumably the dictionary's readers were assumed to know who Forel was without any further explanation, without any risk of them muddling up Auguste-Henri Forel (1848-1931) with his kinsman (I think?) Francois-Alphonse Forel (1841-1912).

    (Wikipedia also advises that "Forel" was the name of the first submarine ever built in Germany back in the dawn of the 20th century, although it was sold to Czarist Russia after the German Navy was uninterested. That's apparently from "Forelle," a common noun (fem.) which means "trout," or more precisely the brown trout a/k/a Salmo trutta.)

  3. KeithB said,

    September 9, 2024 @ 10:20 am

    Reshma Suajami missed what I think would be Trump's main takeaway, though of course it is a lie, that his tariffs will put so much money into our pockets that childcare expenses would be easily handled.

    But all of these "answers" require us to fill in a lot of blanks.

    Trump's answer is still better than Vance's – "Let the grandparents provide childcare!"

  4. Jim said,

    September 9, 2024 @ 10:51 am

    "Heaven protect me from my friends. I can take care of my enemies myself" is an amazing quote.

  5. Jerry Packard said,

    September 9, 2024 @ 11:20 am

    I remember vividly the context I heard ‘word salad’ in the first time I heard it. It was in a neuropsychology class at Cornell in the spring of 1979, in which the instructor (Stephanie Shattuck-Hufnagel) used the term as a mnemonic to describe the verbal output of patients with Wernicke’s (i.e., fluent) aphasia – a mnemonic because both began with ‘w’.

  6. Y said,

    September 9, 2024 @ 1:14 pm

    I first heard "word salad" used a lot when discussing Sarah Palin, when she was running with McCain.
    I don't think the (colloquial) clinical usage is relevant. Here it's mere rhetorical exaggeration, like calling someone a "cretin". The phenomenon manifested by Palin and more so by Trump is more like, say, clause salad. It refers to a fragmented discourse, where a line of logic is interrupted, very often in mid-sentence, shifting to a different one, and so on repeatedly; in the end, not one thought is finished. Specifically, the interviewer's original question is never answered.

  7. Jerry Packard said,

    September 9, 2024 @ 4:39 pm

    ‘clause salad’ – I love it!

  8. Barbara Phillips Long said,

    September 9, 2024 @ 8:02 pm

    Frequently I see “word salad” used to describe a politician’s incorrect or diversionary answer to a question, where the “word salad” is an attempt to avoid the topic. This use implies the answer is illogical, not that it is ungrammatical or incoherent. For example, this headline about Nikki Haley’s answer to a question about the causes of the Civil War:

    “Nikki Haley Serves Up a Hilarious Bowl of Civil War Word Salad”

    https://newrepublic.com/post/177753/nikki-haley-slavery-2024-primary

  9. Chas Belov said,

    September 9, 2024 @ 10:36 pm

    I use "Unicode soup" to describe username handles that contain strings of multiple Unicode symbols characters chosen for appearance rather than meaning.

  10. JPL said,

    September 9, 2024 @ 11:52 pm

    Don't forget one of the most prominent candidates for "new word of the year" in the upcoming end-of-year awards: "sanewashing". A word with a well-established sense that most accurately describes Donald Trump's linguistic output (as, for example, in his response to the child care question) is not "weave" or "word salad", but "rubbish". (Its definition could be tightened for use as a technical term.)

  11. John Swindle said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 7:47 am

    "Word salad" is also used popularly, notably on the social media site Reddit, in discussing the incoherent combinations of foreign words that people tattoo on their bodies. In this use the meaning overlaps partially with "gibberish."

  12. Sergey said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 2:22 pm

    Usually the term "word salad" is associated with Kamala Harris, when she keeps going in circles saying meaningless tautologies. Not to mention her trademark "unburdened by what had been" speech.

  13. Jon W said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 3:59 pm

    That's a testable hypothesis, Sergey! A search of the Lexis database of U.S. news sources generates 449 hits for "Trump" within five words of "word salad," and 229 for "Harris" within five words of "word salad." Modifying the search to look for mentions in the same sentence, rather than within five words, yields almost exactly the same ratio.

  14. Benjamin E. Orsatti said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 4:13 pm

    I get 177 for "word salad" /5 trump and 122 "word salad" /5 harris.
    What are we doing differently?

    Also, why are we doing this?

  15. Benjamin E. Orsatti said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 4:17 pm

    Hang on — I end up with 281 for "word salad" /5 harris and 502 for "word salad" /5 trump (once I removed my U.S. and PA filters), but why are we still getting different numbers?

  16. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 7:20 pm

    To get a meaningful Trump:Harris ratio it would seem like you should to restrict the date range to something starting less than two months ago, because Harris became her party's presumptive 2024 nominee rather more recently than Trump did. Or come up with some other sort of baseline ratio of Trump references to Harris references in the relevant corpus so you can see how frequently some other word or phrase appears in connection with each on a percentage basis.

    Separately, I'm not sure why one would restrict the search to "news sources" collected by Lexis for inclusion in a specific database. The internet is full of strong and vituperative opinions about political candidates typed by a wide range of pontificators (with varied and divergent points of view) who are not professional journalists. Obviously empirical insight into which candidate is most frequently associated with "word salad" by "news source" writers in particular could itself be of interest, but it shouldn't be assumed to be a good proxy for usage among the broader population.

  17. Viseguy said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 11:29 pm

    The problem with "word salad" is that it's too vivid, too gustatory, too suggestive, too moist to stay confined to a narrow, technical meaning. Maybe, in 1904, they'd have landed on a different term if they'd known that, a hundred years later, you'd be able to walk into a lunch-time establishment and pick-and-choose your own greens, toppings and dressing — because that's what happening now, semantically: people use "word salad": to mean what they think it means or what they want it to mean.

    Not that there's anything wrong with that!

  18. Andrew Usher said,

    September 11, 2024 @ 8:03 am

    It would not be surprising to see that the term 'word salad' has been applied in reference to almost any political figure; most often wrongly, if we strictly define it as speech with no coherent structure at all that makes any sense. This Trump speech is not that; indeed, I'd say he did well, given the difficult nature of the question, to come up with any logical response on the spot. Certainly he's done worse, and politicians trying to change the subject in response to a question they they'd rather not talk about is notoriously common.

    That the matter of child-care is difficult might not seem obvious. But as the questioner indicated at the start, neither party effectively addresses it and it's not hard for me to understand why, though I admit the left might be somewhat more willing to propose throwing money at it (to little effect).

    We still seem to lack any adequate term to characterise Trump's speaking style, though it's definitely distinctive enough to apply one.

    Last, the counts you've gotten for 'word salad' are small enough to be perhaps worth manually looking over to eliminate false positives, at least until determining if the ratios are sane. I think I'd do that if I were to perform such a search.

    k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com

  19. Benjamin E. Orsatti said,

    September 11, 2024 @ 8:42 am

    I'm sorry, but the data don't lie — the Vice President is trailing the former President in every important holeric metric:

    ("word salad" /s trump) AND donald : 462

    ("word salad" /s harris) AND kamala : 287

    ("cobb salad" /s trump) AND donald : 6

    ("cobb salad" /s harris) AND kamala : 0

    ("caesar salad" /s trump) AND donald : 44

    ("caesar salad" /s harris ) AND kamala : 1

  20. Andrew said,

    September 11, 2024 @ 9:41 am

    A "word-salad" scene from Boston Legal in which a lawyer has a neurological event during closing arguments

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wkZfq86kgY

  21. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 11, 2024 @ 9:50 am

    I was idly wondering if there were other "salad" phrases/metaphors that had become common in the pejorative subset of the AmEng lexicon, and then I saw a headline in the sports pages reading (bowdlerization in original) "Ex-GM: Giants ‘can’t make chicken salad out of chicken s—.’"* And "you can't make chicken salad out of chickenshit" does appear to be used with some frequency in discussions of professional sports. Although of course the "salad" in the metaphor is not the pejorative part, it's the metaphorical inability to actually come up with (presumptively desirable) salad that gives the metaphor its sting.

    *FWIW the reference was to the (football-playing) New York Giants, not the (baseball-playing) San Francisco Giants.

  22. Jim said,

    September 11, 2024 @ 5:25 pm

    I found Trump's child care answer very decipherable:

    Compared to the amount of money involved with the tariffs he plans to apply, child care is tiny. He doesn't plan to focus on it at all.

  23. Andrew Usher said,

    September 13, 2024 @ 7:27 am

    Essentially, yes, and while that conclusion is (almost surely) false, I think Trump really believes it (as much as he really believes anything in matters of policy) and he's being honest.

    He clearly hasn't thought particularly about the matter, but I don't think many politicians have, as following it unavoidably leads to government-run child care.

RSS feed for comments on this post · TrackBack URI

Leave a Comment