I was watching Bill Maher's show last Friday, and was struck by this mockery of Trump:
BILL MAHER: I have seen this guy change his position from the beginning to the end of a sentence.
DAVID AXELROD: With no punctuation.
That got a big laugh, but what does it mean to say that spoken word lacks punctuation? Unless you're
Victor Borge, you don't voice the punctuation. Occasionally, people say "period" to stress a sentence, but the great bulk of what we say has no punctuation. Only when words are written down does punctuation enter the picture.
Sidetrack:
Punctuation had to be invented, and early written word was not punctuated. Greeks and Romans got some punctuation ideas and experiment, but the serious work in punctuation came with the spread of Christianity:
Whereas pagans had always passed along their traditions and culture by word of mouth, Christians preferred to write down their psalms and gospels to better spread the word of God. Books became an integral part of the Christian identity, acquiring decorative letters and paragraph marks (Γ, ¢, 7, ¶ and others), and many were lavishly illustrated with gold leaf and intricate paintings.
As it spread across Europe, Christianity embraced writing and rejuvenated punctuation. In the 6th Century, Christian writers began to punctuate their own works long before readers got their hands on them in order to protect their original meaning. Later, in the 7th Century, Isidore of Seville (first an archbishop and later beatified to become a saint, though sadly not for his services to punctuation) described an updated version of Aristophanes’ system in which he rearranged the dots in order of height to indicate short (.), medium (·) and long (·) pauses respectively....
Much more at the link, which goes to a BBC.com article.
Punctuation developed out of the idea of preserving the meaning that a speaker would naturally convey if he were speaking from his own thoughts. And, of course, that is what Trump has been doing as he has successfully reached the minds even of
"poorly educated" people as he speaks extemporaneously, tumbling out phrases, often inserting ideas inside ideas.
But the transcripts! Some speakers might end up looking clear and coherent in a verbatim transcript cranked out with no intelligent effort at punctuation, but Trump has all these phrases within phrases. The transcripts make the speaking look like a mess —
changing his position from the beginning to the end of a sentence as Maher put it and
with no punctuation as Axelrod quipped fancifully but
aptly. Or... I should say: Axelrod's quip is aptly applied to the transcript but not to the live speaking, which does have the voiced quality that good punctuation would capture — at least in the ears of a
sympathetic listener. If you don't like Trump, when you hear him speak, you might think
Ugh! Word salad!
Hey, but salad can be good, even salad that's not
salade composée. Sophisticated people are supposed to understand
recursion:
In linguistics, the core application of recursion is phrase embedding. Chomsky posits an operation, unbounded Merge, that recursively merges words to create larger phrases. For example, given, “Jane said Janice thought June was tired and emotional,” merge would construct something like: {Jane, {said, {Janice, {thought, {June, {was, {tired and emotional}}}}}}}. In Chomsky's view, the evolution of unbounded Merge is the genesis of language:
Within some small group from which we are descended, a rewiring of the brain took place in some individual, call him Prometheus, yielding the operation of unbounded Merge, applying to concepts with intricate (and little understood) properties … Prometheus's language provides him with an infinite array of structured expressions. (Chomsky, 2010)
Wouldn't it be a kick in the head if Trump's rhetoric is the leading edge of evolution?
We are going somewhere, and
social media is affecting our brains. Trump is a master of social media, perhaps the greatest master of social media the world has ever seen. The man leaped over traditional media, stodgily written, to wow us — some of us! — with a combination of tweeting and old-time blabbermouth rallies. It's too late to cower in fear of
schizophasia (AKA word salad).
Stop scoffing at the mess of a transcript and start visualizing the missing punctuation. Yesterday,
I was blogging about how the internet and social media were restructuring our brains and how I'd said, before the election, that "Trump may seem weird by old standards" but that he deserves credit for figuring out how to speak in this new culture that has emerged.
In the comments, prompted by gadfly, wildswan took a transcription of Trump speech that Slate had presented as
"Help Us Diagram This Sentence by Donald Trump!"
Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you're a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.
Wildswan wrote it this way (intending some additional indenting that didn't show up on publication):
My uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT;
good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart,
the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—
You know, if you’re a conservative Republican,
if I were a liberal, if, like,
OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat,
they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—
it’s true!—
but
When you're a conservative Republican
they try— oh, do
They do a number—
That’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—
You know I have to give my, like, credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged— but
You look at the nuclear deal. The thing that really bothers me [is that]
—it would have been so easy, and
[The nuclear deal is not] as important [to us] as these lives are.
Nuclear is powerful;
my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and
that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going
to happen and he was right—who would have thought?),
But when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners—
now it used to be three, now it’s four—
but when it was three
and even now,
I would have said
It's all in the messenger, fellas.
and it is fellas because,
you know, they don't, they haven’t figured
that the women are smarter right now than the men, so,
you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but
The Persians are great negotiators; the Iranians are great negotiators;
so, and they, they just killed,
They just killed us.
Wildswan said:
So this is how I would diagram what Trump said. When he was speaking he puts in verbal cues that he is making a digression, making a joke, going back to the point. I've heard him speak and he is perfectly clear. As here: For thirty years the incredible power of nuclear weapons has been clear to me since it was explained by an MIT professor. (People say the conservative Republican are stupid whereas if I had run as a Democrat they would be saying I'm the smartest person in the world as Valerie Jarret said about Obama. It would happen!! But being a Republican, I have to explain credentials over and over as I just did.) Anyhow I know this about the nuclear deal (I won't be heard because what gets heard depends on who is saying it) but I know this - we gave the Iranians nuclear power in exchange for four hostages - and that was a bad deal for America.
Now why does Trump throw in all the side comments? I think they make the speech more interesting when you hear it because it resembles inner thought. When I write I strike out side issues but speaking isn't writing and maybe the internet is making speaking more important than writing. Also on the internet you do jump to little informational bits and sidebars.
And let me add this passage from Janet Malcolm's great book
"The Journalist and the Murderer":
When we talk with somebody, we are not aware of the strangeness of the language we are speaking. Our ear takes it in as English, and only if we see it transcribed verbatim do we realize that it is a kind of foreign tongue. What the tape recorder has revealed about human speech — that Molière’s M. Jourdain was mistaken: we do not, after all, speak in prose — is something like what the nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies revealed about animal locomotion. Muybridge’s fast camera caught and froze positions never before seen, and demonstrated that artists throughout art history had been “wrong” in their renderings of horses (among other animals) in motion. Contemporary artists, at first upset by Muybridge’s discoveries, soon regained their equanimity, and continued to render what the eye, rather than the camera, sees. Similarly, novelists of our tape-recorder era have continued to write dialogue in English rather than in tape-recorderese, and most journalists who work with a tape recorder use the transcript of an extended interview merely as an aid to memory—as a sort of second chance at note-taking—rather than as a text for quotation. The transcript is not a finished version, but a kind of rough draft of expression. As everyone who has studied transcripts of tape-recorded speech knows, we all seem to be extremely reluctant to come right out and say what we mean—thus the bizarre syntax, the hesitations, the circumlocutions, the repetitions, the contradictions, the lacunae in almost every non-sentence we speak. The tape recorder has opened up a sort of underwater world of linguistic phenomena whose Cousteaus are as yet unknown to the general public.
I've quoted that on this blog before.
Back in 2012 — before Trump became a candidate — I said:
Now, I think some people do speak in unbroken, well-structured sentences that are free of grammatical errors that could be transcribed directly into excellent writing, but I don't think those stuck listening to them are very happy with it. We need the backtracking and disfluencies to feel comfortable.
Similarly, most good writers "hear" their words and think about them as if they were speech — it feels speech-like as you go along — but it's actually different from speech.
I'd tend to be suspicious of anyone who seemed to be trying too hard to speak like writing or to write like speaking. I'd wonder what's up? What's the motivation? A speaker who strains to sound like writing might have an inferiority complex or a pompous, arrogant nature. A writer who affects an overly speech-like style may be padding or talking down to us.
A speaker who strains to sound like writing might have an inferiority complex or a pompous, arrogant nature. So maybe I should deduce that Trump does not have an inferiority complex or a pompous, arrogant nature. Oh, but his
haters sure think he does. I'm just saying the man is going to be President. Your snorting about his character and coherence have gotten, suddenly, very old.
How can you get up to speed? Sit down with a Trump transcript and engage in the meditation practice called Punctuation.
पोस्ट्स
