Trump all-caps theories
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From Lane Greene on Bluesky (link):
I've been trying for a while to figure out a theory of Trump's capitalisation. It's mostly nouns like Country, but not always positive ones. I never did nail down the pattern.
But I've got a new theory – bear with me here.
ALL CAPS IS FOR UNGRATEFUL WOMEN.
— Lane Greene (@lanegreene.bsky.social) September 21, 2024 at 12:10 PM
But then there's more data:
In investigating my theory briefly, I have found out that it has some holes. This apparently needed emergency caps too.
— Lane Greene (@lanegreene.bsky.social) September 21, 2024 at 12:16 PM
Looking over a few days of "truths", I feel that Lane's idea has some force, e.g. this recent post, implicitly responding to the widely-noted gender gap in responses to Trump:
But a broader look suggests, unsurprisingly, that a broader theory is needed:
Writing in all capital letters is (often) a typographical metaphor for increased vocal effort. Sometimes increased vocal effort just means that the intended listener is further away, or that the background noise level is greater. But those issues don't really apply to text, at least not in social media, where someone raising their textual voice, across a long stretch of capital letters, suggests a higher level of emotional arousal. And as this paper explains,
Dimensional models suggest that emotion is best understood as occurring within a dimensional space, most commonly a two-dimensional space spanning valence and arousal. Emotional valence describes the extent to which an emotion is positive or negative, whereas arousal refers to its intensity, i.e., the strength of the associated emotional state (Feldman Barrett & Russell, 1999; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1997; Russell, 2003). These models typically assume valence and arousal to be at least in part distinct dimensions (Feldman Barrett & Russell, 1999; Reisenzein, 1994). However, behavioural ratings of emotion word stimuli show that highly positive and highly negative stimuli tend to be more arousing (Bradley & Lang, 1999) and negative stimuli are generally rated higher in arousal than positive stimuli (e.g., Citron, Weekes, & Ferstl, 2012).
For a little bit more on the (very large) topic of typographical metaphors, see 'Everything, everything", 5/2/2017
J.W. Brewer said,
September 22, 2024 @ 7:39 am
JUST STEREOTYPICALLY MAYBE SOMETIMES ELDERLY PEOPLE UNINTENTIONALLY HIT THE CAPS LOCK KEY AND THEN DON'T KNOW HOW TO TURN IT OFF?
ANTC said,
September 22, 2024 @ 7:52 am
But that'd only apply if they hit CAPS LOCK FOR THE VERY FIRST LETTER THEN WERE STUCK WITH IT. WHEREAS MOST DEVICES GIVE YOU THE FIRST LETTER (ONLY) UPSHIFTED ANYWAY.
WHOEVER KEYED THE 'HAPPY EASTER' TRUTH WAS ADEPT ENOUGH TO FIND THEIR WAY TO (PARENS) AND "QUOTES" AND STUFF!
Gregory Kusnick said,
September 22, 2024 @ 9:21 am
I suspect it's not a matter of not knowing how to turn it off, but of keeping eyes on the fingers rather than the screen until a substantial amount of all-caps text has accumulated, and then deciding it's not worth the trouble of going back and retyping in lower case.
Mark Liberman said,
September 22, 2024 @ 12:02 pm
@J.W. Brewer: "JUST STEREOTYPICALLY MAYBE SOMETIMES ELDERLY PEOPLE UNINTENTIONALLY HIT THE CAPS LOCK KEY AND THEN DON'T KNOW HOW TO TURN IT OFF?"
But some "truths" do turn it on and off, for obvious effects of emphasis, e.g. this one from yesterday:
VIRGINIA: Early Voting HAS BEGUN! We need ALL VIRGINIA PATRIOTS TO GET OUT AND VOTE, so that our WIN is “TOO BIG TO RIG.” In order to take our Country back from the Radical Left Thugs and Lunatics that are destroying it, including our Border, the Migrant Invasion, Economy, Inflation, Rising Gas Prices, Cost of Goods, and Crime, we must vote in numbers that they have never seen before. VOTE EARLY, VOTE NOW and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
Or this one, also from yesterday, which also capitalizes a couple of initialisms:
The ratings challenged Bill Maher, on his increasingly boring show on HBO, is really having a hard time coping with TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME. He is a befuddled mess, sloppy and tired, and every conversation, with B and C list guests, seems to start with, or revert back to, ME! This week he had “dumb as a rock” bimbo Stephanie Ruhle, from MSDNC, on the show, along with a Trump hating loser, Bret Stephens, who seemed totally confused and unsure of himself, very much like Maher himself. Steven’s should find himself another line of work because I am driving the FAILING New York Times absolutely crazy, and it is very hard, perhaps impossible, for a writer to write well of me without suffering the wrath of the degenerate editors who, with a push from the top, have gone insane. They apologized to their readers in 2016 for their complete and total MISS, and they’ll do it again in November. The FAILING New York Times is a badly run “newspaper” that has totally lost its way. Put it to sleep!
J.W. Brewer said,
September 22, 2024 @ 1:27 pm
I assume that one practical problem is that the way the particular social-media platform Trump is using works, you don't have typographic options like underlining or italics or boldface, all of which can be used for emphasis in a document prepared in e.g. Word for Windows. So ALLCAPS and Sporadic Capitalization are the emphasis options you would very predictably fall back on, if e.g. more subtle options like writing "the *failing* New York Times," with the surrounding-asterisks adding a more nuanced emphasis, don't work for you.
Because documents filed in lawsuits are typically prepared with software that does make italics and underlining and boldface available, it is rare (at least in the U.S.) to see anyone resorting to ALLCAPS for emphasis in that genre. However, there's an old convention (not universally followed but not uncommon) in copyright infringement litigation to use ALLCAPS for the title of the specific copyrighted works at issue in the particular lawsuit. Which can be a bit jarring if you're not used to it, but then is fine. Except the one time, some two decades ago, when I found myself drafting court documents that used this convention it was for a lawsuit concerning a group of grade-Z horror movies produced some decades previously by a "colorful" Hollywood character whose "colorful" business practices had included selling the rights to the same old films to multiple purchasers unaware of each other's existence. So the papers I worked on switched into ALLCAPS when referencing film titles like THE BEAST MUST DIE or AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS.
Rick Rubenstein said,
September 22, 2024 @ 6:26 pm
I genuinely think posting in all caps for any purpose other than parody would be a good automatic disqualifier for holding public office.
ANTC said,
September 22, 2024 @ 7:20 pm
@Rick, fair point.
Given T's notorious shirking of responsibility for anything that turns out bad for him, he's merely going to claim it was some flunky pressing the buttons.
Chas Belov said,
September 23, 2024 @ 12:59 am
Then there's all those End User License Agreements (EULAs) and Terms of Service (ToS) which put whole paragraphs or series of paragraphs in all caps because they think they're important. I find all caps hard to read, so I either copy it into LibreOffice and choose sentence case or into TextEdit and choose all lower case.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 23, 2024 @ 8:30 am
The "FAILING New York Times" post has at least one other interesting feature. The surname of Bret* Stephens is spelled "Steven's" on second reference. In these days of ubiquitous damn-you-Autocorrectisms that seems an extremely unremarkable glitch in a first draft. But one of the things that's noteworthy about Trump's social-media posting style when compared to that of typical public figures, especially politicians, is that he appears to post first drafts without any proofreading or editing. Perhaps the aura of "authenticity" and directness this provides outweighs the disadvantages? It would I suppose be funny-if-true if he actually has anonymous staff toiling away to tweak his draft posts to give them a fake appearance of off-the-cuff warts-and-all spontaneity.
*I thought there might be a further error but the internet assures me that Mr. Stephens' first name is indeed "Bret" not "Brett," so Mr. Trump's off-the-cuff fuzzy memory is more reliable than mine on that particular topic.
Jerry Packard said,
September 23, 2024 @ 2:55 pm
@Chas Belov
Cynical me would say it is by design, since the vendor doesn’t really want us to read the EULA.
Jerry Packard said,
September 23, 2024 @ 3:03 pm
And observant me would ask why ‘cynical me’ wouldn’t be ‘cynical I’ since it is after all subject of the sentence. Theory: genitive/accusative ‘cynical me’ overrides the nominative ‘cynical I’.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 23, 2024 @ 4:04 pm
@Jerry Packard: A sentence beginning "Cynical I would say" strikes my ear as so unidiomatic as to quite possibly be ungrammatical. "You can't start a sentence with "I" preceded with an adjective" seems like it might be one of those understudied rules of syntax that hopefully someone somewhere has done a paper on? Note that "Cynical he would say" also sounds odd to my ear, if maybe a little less so, so maybe there's a broader principle in play?
Jerry Packard said,
September 23, 2024 @ 5:16 pm
J.W., yes, thank you.
RfP said,
September 23, 2024 @ 6:51 pm
I think “Cynical me” is an NP here, along the model of “li’l ol’ me” or “despicable me.”
J.W. Brewer said,
September 23, 2024 @ 7:38 pm
@RfP: And note that "Cynical me is saying that …" sounds more cromulent than "Cynical me am saying that …" At least to my ear, but if others' ears agree, that's further evidence that it's not functioning as a normal first-person-pronoun subject.
RfP said,
September 23, 2024 @ 10:30 pm
Thanks for your further thoughts on this, JW. (And thanks to Jerry Packard for raising this in the first place.)
I’m going to try to figure out why this works as it does by diving into The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, and A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar. This could take a while…
If anybody else finds this issue interesting, I hope they will chime in, but I will report probably sometime tomorrow on whatever my next level of effort reveals.
AG said,
September 24, 2024 @ 2:54 am
Isn't "cynical me would…" just shorthand for "The version of me who I become when I am being cynical, who I am intentionally choosing to regard as ANOTHER PERSON for the purpose of making this rhetorical figure about self-observation effective, would…"
RfP said,
September 24, 2024 @ 5:53 am
I think I've got a partial answer to what's going on here.
But first, to respond to AG: speaking strictly as a non-expert: (1) I think you're right; (2) that would be cheating!
My goal is to find a formal description of this phenomenon in the form of either an outright rule or at least some sort of formal decomposition.
Page 430 of CGEL, which is part of the section describing pronouns, mentions that "Pronouns do not normally allow internal pre-head dependents: *Extravagant he bought a new car … [with] one minor exception, the use of a few adjectives such as lucky, poor, silly, with the core personal pronouns"
Speaking again as a non-expert, you could suggest that this rule might have been extended beyond the traditional handful of adjectives to "despicable, cynical, …"
Or, on the other hand, is this more like a proper noun? Such as "Nervous Nelly" or "Sensitive Ed"—but extended deictically by, for example, the perhaps canonical "Despicable Me"?
All of which still leaves the question of why it would take the third person. The proper noun theory would seem to fit better with that convention.
Jerry Packard said,
September 24, 2024 @ 7:03 am
It seems what we are talking about here is case assignment, which in English we only see on pronouns. In this situation, the tug of war is between case assigned by the sentencial slot (subject assigns nominative – I, we; and object assigns accusative – me, us), and case assigned by the internal structure (like the increasingly seen ‘John likes you and I’, where traditional grammar would give us ‘John likes you and me’, because ‘you and me’ is a complex NP that speakers increasingly assign nominative case giving us ‘you and I’ even though sentence syntax tells us it should be accusative ‘me’.
The same is seen with ‘cynical me’ being assigned accusative case ‘me’ when sentence should assign nominal ‘cynical I’. That’s why it seems to me like in English, the internal structure of the NP is starting to assign case, thereby trumping sentence case assignment, giving us accusative ‘cynical me’ overriding the nominative ‘cynical I’.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
September 24, 2024 @ 7:36 am
It's funny that English speakers conceive of their own self-identities in the accusative case. The essential, monadic consciousness is "Me", not "I". So, we say things like the "me generation" and, although it is proper to ask, "Who am I?", that question calls for a "label" or a series of "labels"; it's "accidental". But, "What is 'me'?" calls for a more searching, onto-epistemological inquiry.
AG said,
September 24, 2024 @ 7:45 am
I'm definitely a non-expert and this is still probably cheating, but isn't "cynical me" in this case just the *proper name* of a third person being referred to? If a person named Jack who used to live in Paris were reminiscing, he might refer to what "Paris Jack" would have done, treating his past self as an other. If I think of "past me" or "drunk me" or "cynical me", they are a different person from me, and those are just their names… the "me" in their names is not a real pronoun that needs declining.
RfP said,
September 24, 2024 @ 9:32 am
I think AG is right on both counts.
Jerry Packard said,
September 24, 2024 @ 12:40 pm
@AG
Very nice.
RfP said,
September 24, 2024 @ 1:00 pm
…and just to be clear: I don't think this is cheating!
I think AG made a clear case for this being a proper name, which therefore does not decline like a pronoun.
Yes, very nice!
J.W. Brewer said,
September 24, 2024 @ 1:52 pm
@RfP, what does CGEL mean in context by the "core" personal pronouns? Does the discussion suggest that "silly him" would work better as a subject NP than "silly he" would?
RfP said,
September 24, 2024 @ 5:27 pm
@JW
Here’s a long-winded answer to your first question, in order to provide context that might be helpful to some. I’m drastically condensing from pages 425 and 426:
As for your second question, here’s what they say right after my earlier quote from page 430:
AG said,
September 24, 2024 @ 8:16 pm
not entirely related to linguistics at all, but this discussion prompted a sonnet:
replicable me.
we calve a self each step, each moment-break,
shed selves like snail-slime on our life-bough’s knurled
and knotted nodes – an us-but-other’s hurled
into existence, as a growing snake
sloughs scales, as petal-shedding budlets take
abundant millefeuille form, as shark-teeth curled
within bone-arc of bullet-jaw, unfurled
and then snapped clean, proliferate; we break
like scattered rays on beveled-crystal cants
into unnumbered past and future ‘me’s,
with only one, the present, reading this –
or is that reader other? shapes advance
in darkened uplands; through the spreading trees
move silent flanks. we aim, and always miss.
ktschwarz said,
September 26, 2024 @ 5:57 pm
"Cynical me": I had a feeling this had been mentioned on Language Log before, finally tracked it down. It was Here comes the accusative from 2004, where Arnold Zwicky analyzes why "me" and not "I" was used in this sentence that he heard on the radio:
Here's what he says about pronoun case and verb agreement (Zwicky's asterisks agree exactly with J.W. Brewer's comments above):