Disclaimer: This is not a policical post but a language discussion.
Recently I ran across this article that for some reason struck me as hilarious. Now I'm Trump supporter so I was curious as to what Mr. Charles Blow was ranting about. First he insults everyone that voted for Trump by saying we all use the words that people with 4-6 grade education would use, and Trump uses words even less educated than that. Then Blow adds insult to injury by saying that at least Trump is better than George W. Bush. I was laughing too hard to continue, but I just had too.
Blow goes on to say that we are so stupid we think because Trump delivers his words in "a clumsy, folksy lie delivered by a shyster using broken English..." we accept them as truth. He suggests the folksy style lowers our natural suspicion because we just think someone who talks on that level must be telling the truth.
He also insults both Trump and his supporters by directly stating that Trump watches too much TV and doesn't read that much. Implying his supporters are the same. Blow describes Trump's recent interviews with The Times, The Associated Press, Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal shows a person with "the intellectual depth of a coat of paint." Blow continues by adding that "In Trump world, facts don’t matter, truth doesn’t matter, language doesn’t matter." And concludes with "Degradation of the language is one of Trump’s most grievous sins."
Like Trump or not, I am still laughing because one, Blow really thinks degradation of the language is a sin, and two, that Trump is the cause of it all. The beauty and frustration of our peculiar language is that it is fluid. As new waves of immigrants move here, our language takes on the challenge of relating to us all. Twitter and the hashtag phenomenon has totally changed the way we spell things...and I am kinda liking the challenge of learning clever ways to say things like LOL, GN, ROTFL...the list goes on.
I mean truly we do not say things like "He loved chivalrye Trouthe and honour, freedom and curteisye"...Geoffrey Chaucer. Or ""Ha! Art thou Bedlam? Dost thou thirst base Trojan, to have me fold up Parca's fatal web? Hence! I am qualmish at the smell of leek" from Shakespeare's Henry V.
Let's celebrate our language and its fluidity. And I did email Blow and say one of the underpinnings of writing to keep things on an 8th grade level. And don't worry our language can handle it.
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