The building blocks of Trump-speak are not nouns and verbs
by Sam Leith / December 14, 2016 / Leave a commentPublished in January 2017 issue of Prospect Magazine
The President-Elect ©Michael Vadon, Wikimedia Commons
I thought I would make a start on evaluating President-Elect Donald Trump’s use of the English language, for those who hold faith that the soon-to-be most powerful man on Earth knows what he’s talking about.
The following glossary must be seen only as preliminary notes on the Trump idiolect. For instance, there is a debate over whether he says “bigly” or “big league”—the NYU phonetician Tara McAllister Byun has inclined to the latter, arguing that the “velar pinch and stop closure/burst” suggest “big league.” But until Trump settles the matter himself it is prudent to include both.
Certain of his syntactic idiosyncrasies still need nailing down, too. He sometimes, but not always, talks about himself in the third person. “Nobody would be tougher on Isis than Donald Trump,” he said in the campaign. Whether there’s a psychological or a brand-management rationale for that is outside the scope of this article, but it’s an identifiable feature of his discourse.
There is free semantic variation between various adverbial intensifiers, including the “bigly” and “big league” I mentioned. But they are always used in predicative positions. Trump says “I’m going to cut taxes bigly”; never “I’m going to bigly cut taxes” or (were he prissy about split infinitives) “I’m going bigly to cut taxes.”
You have now reached your limit of 3 free articles in the last 30 days.
But don't worry! You can get another 7 articles absolutely free, simply by entering your email address in the box below.
When you register we'll also send you a free e-book—Writing with punch—which includes some of the finest writing from our archive of 22 years. And we'll also send you a weekly newsletter with the best new ideas in politics and philosophy of culture, which you can of course unsubscribe from at any time
Prospect takes your privacy seriously. We promise never to rent or sell your e-mail address to any third party.
You can unsubscribe from the Prospect e-mail newsletter at any time.
