It’s starting to make sense how 19th century people could fall for literal snake oil salesman, but would never elect a clown like Trump. He couldn’t exist if he was only able to communicate through print.
Been saying for years, since I first read a bland speech transcription, listening to and reading Trump are very different experiences.
I don’t really think so. That’s what all his speeches have sounded like to me. If he stays on the teleprompter he can do OK, not good but not terrible either, but he rarely stays on the teleprompter. This is what it sounds like when he improvises. Still, some people listen to that schizophrenic-stream-of-consciousness and hear a great orator. That’s something I’ll never understand.
It’s a different way of processing information. It’s a flow rather than discrete packets of information being decoded and given meaning. Interestingly, there are stong parallels with Ebonics. A lot of hip hop uses this. If you tried to transcribe many hip hop verses as prose, they would make no sense, but given the general context and the vibe and tone of what’s being said, you get the meaning.
It’s also similar to the kind of baby talk that you might give to a pet. Why do you always call your cat, whose given name is Bartholomew, “Dingly Wingly / Dinglebutt / Dingity dogg”? The specific, discrete, quantised definition of what you’re saying doesn’t make sense. But “doggo” conveys a very different meaning than “dog”. Animals have a limited grasp of English, but they understand tone and intent.
This also means that these forms of language / communication are rapidly evolving since they’re based on similar context and events and aren’t beholden to a strict list of defined meanings. The connotation of a word is far more meaningful than the definition.
Trump says, “I ride down the electric.” That’s a nonsense phrase. But what does the word “electric” feel like to a right winger? You can imagine a word cloud with “poorly constructed”, “scam”, “dangerous”, “overhyped”, “expensive”, and of course the ever popular “liberal” but also some things that are difficult to put into words. A sense that we are better than them because they spend a lot of money on sketchy tech but we believe in the tried and true old ways. A feeling that they think they’re so smart but we know the truth of the world. A house of cards propped up by technology and no soul, which will inevitably collapse at any minute. Trump conveys all this in a word, and his followers understand all this in a word, and they all do it without thinking. It’s shorthand. They communicate almost nonverbally. And if you’re not part of the in-group, you don’t have the context to understand the flow of the speech.
