I flipped on the news early Monday morning, and there was a linguist analyzing what had emerged from Trump's mouth at a rally. The newscaster, Joy Reid, was earnest as she read a series of words that made no sense. Like a jazz singer scatting, Trump had tossed up a word salad of epic proportions. "He says he has the best words.... but he seems to be using all the words, regardless of whether they make sense or not," she said. The woman is a writer so she was experiencing the same thing I was—pain. She repeated various sections of his speech, searching for the secret message underlying the words. Was there any? The linguist, John McWhorter, broke it down for her. "When you're processing language, the first thing that comes into your brain is the tone, the music, then the content." Like animals in a forest, the strange noises emerging from Trump's mouth carried an emotional code, though the string of nonsense was utterly lacking in any coherent meaning. For a writer, this can be crazy making. Sure, we deal in the musicality of language, but writers spend an inordinate amount of … [Read more...] about Writing in the Age of Insanity
Archives for July 2018
