You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you
During the 2016 election campaign
elite opinion was both shocked and amused by the simplified language found in
Donald Trump’s speeches. Linguists studied them and found them to be at a
middle school level or lower. They noted the low frequency of polysyllabic
words, the frequent repetition of vague descriptors like “marvelous” and the
lack of concrete ideas and substance. This phenomenon raises some questions
about how far this trend could continue. Will political discourse eventually
devolve into short bursts of sentence fragments and grunting, like the language
use displayed by the president, lawyers and doctors in the film Idiocracy?
The passage below is an imagined speech of a post-Trump candidate in the next
election. In the language of this imagined candidate, polysyllabic words have
been entirely eliminated. This change imposes interesting limitations on
thought processes and content:
Make this place great
one more time
Trump. What a fag,
with all that fag talk. Big words like mar... mar... marvulus. I can’t say it.
Can’t spell it too. Can you? No? Who cares?! Who needs those big words with all
their parts with sounds like “ay” or “ee” or some such in each one... Ah, Trump. He tried to build a wall, but
he failed. He failed. It’s true. That’s it. What can I say? That dream is no
more. But we will do more. Yes, we will. We will dig a hole. A great hole. A
huge hole. And we’ll put all those folks in it. You know the ones. Yes, Trump
and all those posh jerks who let you down. That’s right. And we’ll get folks
from someplace else to pay for it. Yes, trust me. They will pay. Trump failed
to make them pay for the wall, but I will make them pay for the hole. I can do
it. Just me. No one else. With you all, we will make this place great one more
time.
Simplified, “dumbed-down” political
rhetoric should not, however, be confused with condescension toward a particular
group. In general, the people Trump targeted with his middle school English can
deal with higher level language when they want to, and let’s not forget that
much of the language in the canon of American literature was derived from rural
America. The purpose of dumbed-down political rhetoric, rather than
condescension and pandering, is to get an idea into as many heads as possible,
as quickly as possible, and that is very hard to do when your slogan is “expropriate
the means of production.” If that were the goal, it would be easier to conceal
it under a simple slogan like “make America great again” and just leave it
unsaid that it will be made great by the aforementioned expropriation.
Related: See this language analysis by Nerdwriter 1.
This propaganda technique was
artfully illustrated many years ago in a film that takes place “about the time
of our conflict with Saddam and the Iraqis,” during the presidency of GHW Bush.
The protagonist in The
Big Lebowski has been a committed pacifist since his days in
1960s anti-war movement, but by 1990 he has been worn down, marginalized and
alienated. He self-medicates with booze and marijuana, and hangs out with a
gun-toting supporter of military intervention. He has let down his guard. As
soon as he is provoked by a random act of violence, he succumbs to the dumbed-down
political slogan that has been repeated endlessly in the media in recent weeks.
Then he finds the president’s words flowing out of his own mouth when he faces
his adversary: this aggression will not stand.
So the phenomenon applies to the
entire population, not just supposed dupes and bumpkins in the flyover states. In
2008, Barack Obama’s slogan “hope and change” was actually simpler and more
vague than Trump’s slogan “make America great again.” The former consists of
only three monosyllabic words, while the latter consists of four words and a
total of eight syllables. Both were used in bait and switch con jobs. Fool you
once. Fool you twice. The city slicker lawyer from Chicago followed by the real
estate tycoon from New York.
You might be asking what my point is
here with all this talk about syllable counts and simplified language. First of
all, let’s define our terms. What’s a syllable? All English speakers know in an
intuitive way. They can count the syllables in a word correctly, but when asked
to define the term precisely they might be stumped.
In my day job I teach English to
native speakers of Japanese, and I always have a lot of trouble teaching them how
the language works “under the hood.” They want me to correct their mistakes but
not explain them, and because they lack proficiency with the necessary metalanguage
(language about language), I can’t give explanations even if they want them.
When they mishear a word or place the
accent on the wrong syllable, they don’t know what I mean by “syllable” when I
point out the problem. Even if they look up the word in their bilingual dictionaries,
and they get the word onsetsu, that
still doesn’t help very much. They “know” that word, but they still don’t
understand the concept. At this point, they could get the answer right on a
multiple-choice test, which would result in both teacher and students failing
to notice that nothing has been learned. The meaning of syllable is poorly
understood even though Japanese is a syllabic language, with each letter of the
hiragana syllabary (not alphabet)
representing a consonant followed by a vowel, or a vowel by itself. There are
no letters for consonants. Because their language is made up of a simple set of
syllables, Japanese speakers have to think about syllables even less than
English speakers do. Because English allows for consonant clusters in its
syllables, there are thousands of possible syllables, whereas there are only a
few hundred possible in Japanese. This is one of the factors that make it so
difficult for Japanese learners of English to comprehend spoken English if they
are not exposed to it during a critical period for acquisition during
childhood. Helping language learners see these differences leads them to a
better understanding of where they need to focus their efforts.
So what is a syllable? Anyone who
pursues the question for a while could come up with a good answer, but it has
been the fashion for many years in education to avoid lengthy analysis and
instead keep things simple because, it is assumed, teachers are working in a
mass education system that has to aim for the lowest common denominator. Few
children, supposedly, are capable of or interested in analysis. We’re not all
eggheads and brainiacs, right? This is what I was always told when I suggested
to peers that we should get back to analytical methods. However, in communicative
language teaching, which was driven by the demands of mass education and market
demands to make learning emotionally satisfying in the short term, it was
assumed that everything could be learned through practice, “natural” methods, exposure
to input, and intuitive understanding.
I’ve always thought this approach
sells people short and defeats the purpose of formal study, and my
disagreements with it led me to move overseas many years ago and pursue career alternatives
elsewhere.
So while you were reading the above
paragraphs to yourself, perhaps you were thinking about the syllables in the
words and you realized a syllable consists of...
... a vowel by itself or
... a vowel preceded by one or more
consonants or semi-vowels or
... a vowel followed by one or more
consonants or semi-vowels or
... a vowel preceded and followed by one or more
consonants or semi-vowels
If I can lead my students to this
understanding, we are still faced with another problem. We need to define vowel, consonant and semi-vowel.
They check their bilingual dictionaries and see familiar words they learned in
their high school English classes. They think they know now, but of course they
don’t. We have to start thinking consciously about what is going on in our
mouths when we say various words. We have to pay attention to our voices and
all the speech articulators. Any idiot can do this and get to the correct
understanding, but teachers rarely make their students do it, unless they are
teaching a university course in linguistics.
After reflecting a while on how the
mouth articulates various speech sounds, the average person can figure out that
a consonant is a speech sound made with or without the voice which involves
contact between speech articulators such as the lips, teeth, tongue, palate,
glottis and so on.
A vowel is the opposite of a
consonant. There is no contact between the speech articulators, and the vowel
sounds are distinguished from each other by the position of the tongue, shape
of the mouth opening, and slackness of the jaw.
Readers may notice at this point
that this description goes far beyond what they learned in school, where
teachers probably talked about “consonant letters” and “vowel letters” and left
it at that, confusing the matter further by suggesting that these building
blocks of spoken language are the visual representations of them—a confusion of
shadows on the cave wall with reality, so to speak.
Many explanations in textbooks also
gloss over an important distinction between semi-vowels and vowels, and they
classify the former as consonants. But of course any child could notice that
when one makes the sound usually denoted by the visual symbol r, there is no contact of speech
articulators. There is near-contact, but no contact. Other semi-vowels appear,
for example, in the initial sound of uniform
and water, and in the last sound of full.
When you analyze to this level and
assure that you have defined your terms thoroughly, you’re not glossing over
and simplifying things for learners whom you assume can’t handle the truth or
are not interested in it. If you make learners do this kind of analysis, you
build a foundation for later mastery of the subject. If you don’t do it, you
set up the learner for that stage of surrender later on that many people are
familiar with: giving up because everything seems random and senseless. The
learner quits, feeling like an idiot because his process hasn’t involved mastery
of the successive steps in it.[1]
At this point I hope I can make a
tenuous connection between language learning and acquiring literacy in
political rhetoric and discourse. Just as we fail to teach children how to
investigate and analyze the building blocks of language, we fail at the task of
teaching what is perhaps the highest-order language skill: how to communicate
in society in order to collectively create a just society. Without having
learned how to analyze our political language and our institutions, without
having learned our history, we are lost in this confusing moment of early 2017 when
some kind of revolution and resistance to it is happening, but no one
understands what it’s all about. Our two-fold quandary is summed up well in an
essay by C.J. Hopkins. It is...
(1) how to oppose the Trumpians, and other
neo-nationalist insurgencies, without serving the interests of Neoliberalism;
and (2) how to oppose Neoliberalism without serving the interests of the
Neo-nationalists. Which is more or less a classic Zen koan designed to make
one’s head explode.[2]
We are unprepared and uneducated
when it comes to facing this dilemma. The opportunity to learn never comes from
the mass media, nor in public education, and certainly not in the adult lives
of people who have to work to live or live precariously looking for work. This
is why political rhetoric became monosyllabic, vague and empty. One candidate
labelled her opponents as “deplorables” while the other talked about making
America great again and building a wall. Little else from this campaign will be
remembered in years to come.
All we have now is the resulting
chaos made up of a revolution coming from within the executive branch, a
resistance, and echoes of counter-resistance. In all of these the ideology, funding,
goals and the lead actors are unclear to almost everyone involved. Is it coming
from the bottom up, or are the masses just being swept up in a family feud
within the duopoly-corporate-pentagon-intelligence agencies complex? As I contemplate
the Zen koan mentioned above, I’ll keep in mind the words of an American poet
laureate who very long ago was wise enough not to let himself be turned into a
celebrity spokesman for political causes:
See
the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns...
You shouldn’t let
other people get your kicks for you
Notes
[1] Sal Khan, “Let’s
teach for mastery—not test scores,” TED, November 2015.
[2] C.J. Hopkins, “The
Resistance and Its Double,” Counterpunch,
January 30, 2017.
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