Language Expert: Donald Trump's Way Of Speaking Is 'Oddly Adolescent' | The 11th Hour | MSNBC

Let's agree, for the sake of the next conversation, that Donald Trump uses the most colorful

language

of any president, at least in the modern era, and says some of the most questionable things, and that's where our next guest comes in. John McWhorter is a linguist who has a PhD in the field, teaches at Columbia and has written extensively and is also colorful when he talks about Donald Trump and specifically how this president speaks, so we talked about it with Professor John McWhorter, thank you for joining us. Thanks Bryan. I've been meaning to ask you what your linguistic definition of this President Donald Trump is linguistically unadorned this is the basics this is certainly what the

language

was like when it first emerged among people who didn't have writing and we're getting his verbal Sealegs for the first time , this is where it began and in that way, as in many others, Donald Trump is an original, which would mean that education and schooling have had no effect on his use of language, and he is quick to remind us that he went to the best schools, mhm. and learned nothing from them, speaks like someone who did not pay attention to one of the objectives of education, which is to refine our natural and innate inclinations to speech, which are excellent for casual circumstances, but he uses those same ways of

speaking

and that most of us used to consider formal and important circumstances.

I think in his line of work they call it etiquette when you add something to the end of a traditional sentence, so he often labels a sentence with "believe me, believe me" and imposes something on it that he thought was missing. in the original mhm sentence is that he is reinforcing and he is also using oral speech where what we always do is check that the other person understands what we are saying, that he is in the same boat as us. so that's what you know, that's what things like lol can be when texting, he does it too, but again, it's not when texting, he does it under formal circumstances, which means who never leaves the realm of the casual when he speaks, which is different even let's say indigenous societies where reading or writing does not exist, but there is always a high way of

speaking

and a low way of speaking, the chief does not simply get up and talk to ours, there is a friend of our broadcast Eli laughs who works for The Wall Street Journal, who has covered him for some time and says about Donald Trump that there are visual and audio messages that spice up his speech with where if you know what's coming, you know what's coming.

I want to make a montage of a Trump quote. people don't know it and in Eli Stone Cole's reading people don't know it for Donald Trump it means I just found out here are the examples France is the first and oldest ally of the United States many people don't know that our first president Republican Abraham Lincoln ran his first campaign for public office in 1832, great president, most people don't even know he was a Republican, does anyone know? A lot of people don't know that people don't realize that we are an incredibly divided country, but now I have to tell you that it is an incredibly complex issue, no one knew that healthcare could be so complicated, so you're laughing, Why well, that aspect of him?

I can't say anything particularly linguistic about it, it's because he has the need to be the alpha male that The thing most people don't know is that this comes from that same well, the idea is that he's always the one one step away. ahead and, in that, frankly, I don't find him as linguistically challenged as someone who is quite strangely

adolescent

for someone. Who is an elderly person? What about his other favorites? Believe me and more than ever before or more than we have seen before. Well, some of that is because they're actually just. I'm sorry to say, but there is a limit. thoughts and very often he talks and I think he runs out of news and he covers it with things like believe me or it can never be that something is very bad or very very bad, those are his equivalents of about um or scratching his head I think he often the content of what he says is much thinner than most of the verbiage he spews.

He is 71 years old. He is now president in an era of instant, real-time fact-checking. He's not used to having his offhand superlatives verified in real time. Do you think he's hit upon that dynamic? Yeah, he's unfortunate because I don't think he's going to change that way. He just doesn't wear deodorant on Sunday. The best way to talk and that includes that you have to have a more responsible sense of truth than when you are just talking to your friends when we talk casually all the time we say things that maybe if we check it things could be different.

He doesn't understand that if you're president of the United States you can't just talk, it sounds like you're just talking because you move your mouth and vibrate your vocal cords, but there's another art that you're supposed to master, he wasn't interested in that kind of thing, let's say at school he's someone who is insensitive to the artistic, he has a rather narcotic joy in dismissal and belittlement instead of building and decorating, so he'll keep running into that. wall, he doesn't understand that when you're president you have to think about things like what we might call truth conditions in linguistics, that's what you're describing, the intersection of narcissism and linguistics, which is beautifully said, he's what happens when Get someone who is extremely witty and I also think it's safe to say that I don't think he's crazy, but he's clinically narcissistic and he talks to us all the time in our homes about serious things and that's what's surprising about hearing this person talk about the unfortunate. it's how much we've had to listen to it, but I don't think we should get the impression that it's going to change because we're in an informal era in some ways it's a product of something that's been going on since the mid-'60s and in many ways it's, in the good sense, the fact that in America you and I would have had to wear worn-out hats and suits even on hot summer days.

Thank God, that's over, but something else that remained was the feeling that you spoke. Nowadays it's better for us all to fake it to some extent, but we could have predicted that someone was going to come along who didn't really even bother to do anything but talk instead of talking and might even become President of the United States. I don't think Trump is going to be the last in that sense as far as public speaking, hopefully, the other things, but public speaking II, he is the beginning of something new. Hi, I'm Chris Hayes from MSNBC, thanks for watching MSNBC on YouTube if you want.

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