John Mcwhorter, teaches linguistics at Columbia University/The Atlantic
They suggest not just inadequate manners or polish, but inadequate thought.
The president of the United States has many faults, but let’s not ignore this one: He cannot write sentences. If a tree falls in a forrest and no one is there to hear it … wait: Pretty much all of you noticed that mistake, right? Yet Wednesday morning, the president did not; he released a tweet referring to “forrest fires” twice, as if these fires were set by Mr. Gump. Trump’s serial misuse of public language is one of many shortcomings that betray his lack of fitness for the presidency.
Trump’s writing suggests not just inadequate manners or polish—not all of us need be dainty—but inadequate thought. Nearly every time he puts thumb to keypad, he exposes that he has never progressed beyond the mentality of the precollegiate, trash-talking teen.
A few days ago, he wrote the following about the partial government shutdown:
I remain committed to finding an agreemnet that reopens our Government and ensures that our Nation’s borders are safe and secure. I urge Congress to rejoin me in Washington to immediatly pass appropriations legislation
The eccentric capitalization (“Government,” “Nation’s”) marks this as written by Real Donald Trump, because he is fond of using caps in a fashion that’s part Benjamin Franklin and part Little Rascals. Sadly, the misspellings only reinforce that sourcing, accompanied elsewhere in the missive by “commonsense” and “shut down.”
One must not automatically equate sloppy spelling with sloppy thinking. Quite a few admired writers are not great spellers before editing. The problem here is that he neither checked the tidiness of this message before it went out to the public, nor asked anyone else to take that step, about an issue as dire as an interruption of governmental services (Governmental Services?). Such negligence is of a piece with Trump’s general disregard of norms, details, and accuracy.Trump’s blindness to the basics of adult-level composition is so amply documented that it might now seem normal, which is why it’s instructive to contrast Trump with Harry Truman. He wrote to his future wife, Bess, in 1912:Say, it sure is a grand thing that I have a high-school dictionary handy. I even had to look on the back to see how to spell the book itself. The English language so far as spelling goes was created by Satan I am sure.Truman’s unquestioned attendance to spelling dictionary correctly contrasts neatly with Trump’s casually distributing misspellings like “agreemnet,” especially because Truman was the last American president who did not have a college degree. Truman, writing to a loved one, wanted to get the word dictionary right; Trump, writing to the entire nation, is happy with a half-dozen flubs in one terse tweet. The sheer lack of focus on Trump’s part, and by extension, the staff who should be vetting messages like this, is stunning.One could call this critique a mere matter of formalism. However, Trump-talk is more than typos. In his actual speech, Trump presents an oddly abbreviated rendition of English, reminiscent of languages when they are dying out or compromised in some way.
For example, Trump is given to talking about “doing” things when most would choose a more specific verb. Last summer, Trump bragged of having told Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May “how to do Brexit.” “Do” it? Like “doing” Cats, or shots? Mere do does rather gracelessly drag the statement down to the cold, hard pavement. Trump also hopes he can “do” a wall in Mexico: “That’s 13,000 miles,” he said. “Here, we actually need 1,000 because we have natural barriers. So we need 1,000. We can do a wall. We’re going to have a big, fat, beautiful door right in the middle of the wall.”Trump’s love of “doing” might indicate his professed expertise in deal making. One does—colloquially, at least—“do” a deal, and Trump supposes that Brexit and the border wall will result from “dealing.” But this very assumption reflects an inability to grapple with the complexities of state matters. He simply cannot accept—cannot grasp—that international diplomacy could possibly require more subtlety than a real-estate transaction. His phrasing suggests someone taking in nothing from the urgent happenings around him, someone refusing to read his briefs or anything else.
Truman is useful again, in that he had a hankering to catch, at least once in his life, Lucia di Lammermoor. Not that he was any great fan of classical music, mind you: “I have never seen Lucia and I am curious to know how much torture one has to endure to get to hear the sextet,” he wrote to Bess. However, you only go around once, and Truman had a basic desire to experience something beyond himself and the ordinary—to grow.