"The president's linguistic life is as oral as that of a medieval artisan"
McWhorter on 11th Hour last night was great... older article of his in same vein...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/trump-liddle-tweet/599032/
"....This means that Trump processes language orally rather than in print. To him, the spoken word is paramount; the written word is an abstraction, sterile, not a comfort zone, the province of dullards fond of, as it were, dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s.
One might suppose that oral and print language are equivalent alternatives. But they are not. Orality encourages a focus on the personal; speaking expresses feeling. Print encourages a focus on the impersonal, the disinterested, the analytical. This is hardly to say that oral language precludes such thinking; however, print makes more space for it. Orality encourages compact parcels of thought—we speak in quick little packets of eight or nine words. Print encourages the extended argument, the careful case. Orality reinforces what you know—recall “shithole countries.” Print collects information we don’t memorize, ever available for consultation and analysis—think of reflection, statecraft, leadership. The printed word encouraged and still encourages intellectual and even spiritual transformations in what it is to be human.
Trump is a president of the United States whose linguistic life is as oral as that of a medieval artisan. I’d compare him to a 7-year-old, except that many second graders already read more than he does. By defending his usage of this “hyphen,” he reveals himself not simply as a post-1960s American letting it all hang out. That little hanging mark reveals Trump as someone who takes in so little, processes so little beyond the vagaries of running conversation that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he is, quite simply, a liddle dim. Which, in a commander in chief, is a liddle scary.
= new reply since forum marked as read
between not necessarily correct offense and possibly correct truth.
The president's culture--like that of many other Americans--is presumably primarily oral.
In dismissing orality in order to dismiss Trump, he dismisses those subcultures and designates the bearers of those cultures as, well, a "liddle dim."
Of course, as a linguist he knows that reading is a recent addition to the human linguistic repertoire, and that most people, most of the time--and in some cultures, all of the time--are functioning in an oral way and not a written way. This comes into play often when a government and advocates decide that a language needs a written form, that it needs to have vocabulary innovated for all the accoutrements of modern life. Once those are produced and people hired to make translations, to produce a newspaper or printed materials, they find that now they have to go back and not only teach the language, but get the "liddle dim" people to start actually using the stuff they argued needed to be produced.
It's a case of "I want to insult Trump" but at the same time he insults most of the bearers of highly oral cultures in the US (which, if I named them, would trigger cries of "racist!"
and most cultures outside the US, Western Europe, and other centers of formal learning. More of the "if you're not WEIRD, you're weird" thinking.
McWhorter does this from time to time when, like Lakoff, he tries to weaponize linguistics for partisan ends.
