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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":

September 9, 2024 @ 8:52 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Cinical applications, Communication, Rhetoric

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