{"id":41918,"date":"2019-02-20T17:03:35","date_gmt":"2019-02-20T22:03:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=41918"},"modified":"2019-02-20T17:17:16","modified_gmt":"2019-02-20T22:17:16","slug":"green-new-singsong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=41918","title":{"rendered":"Green New Singsong"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ever since Donald Trump sang his Emergency Song (\"Emergency in B Flat<\/a>\", 2\/17\/2019), I've been hearing similar intonation patterns all over the place — in a line at the market where one shopper was telling another about someone's many excuses for not meeting her; on a sports talk radio program where the host was enumerating the many inconclusive reports about Bryce Harper's destination<\/a>; and this morning on Radio Times, where Robinson Meyer was telling Marty Moss-Coane about climate change politics<\/a>. In that last case, I made a note of the program and the time and found the podcast — so here's the passage:<\/p>\n

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This is a common speech pattern in American English, so most likely President Trump has primed my salience detector rather than the general public's prosodic choices. But still…<\/p>\n

Anyhow, Trump's version involved unusually high-pitched and chant-like final level stretches, as you can hear by comparing Robinson Meyer's performance to the president's:<\/p>\n