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Advanced English Skills

03 сентября 2024 15:40

Language Log
Trump's rhetorical "weave"

Shawn McCreesh, "Meandering? Off-Script? Trump Insists His ‘Weave’ Is Oratorical Genius." NYT 9/1/2024:

For weeks, former President Donald J. Trump’s advisers have urged him to be more disciplined and to stop straying off-message.

But on Friday, while speaking at a rally in Johnstown, Pa., Mr. Trump insisted that his oratory is not a campaign distraction but rather a rhetorical triumph.

“You know, I do the weave,” he said. “You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”
This is (a version of) one of the points that I've made over the years in (too many) posts about Trump's speaking style. Back in 2015, Geoff Pullum posted about "Trump's aphasia", and I responded:

Geoff Pullum uses terms like "aphasia", and phrases like "I don't think there's any structure in there", in describing a quoted passage from Donald Trump's 7/21/2015 speech in Sun City SC. But in my opinion, he's been misled by a notorious problem: the apparent incoherence of much transcribed extemporized speech, even when the same material is completely comprehensible and even eloquent in audio or audio-visual form.

This apparent incoherence has two main causes: false starts and parentheticals. Both are effectively signaled in speaking — by prosody along with gesture, posture, and gaze — and therefore largely factored out by listeners. But in textual form, the cues are gone, and we lose the thread.

And in some of these posts, I've been tempted to use the term "weave" to describe the result, since the repeated layers of false starts and parentheticals are a bit like the patterns of overlaid and intersecting threads in woven fabric. "Thread" is a standard metaphor for connected topics in discourse, and for connected processes in computing — as in my phrase "we lose the thread".

I've always rejected the "weave" metaphor for Trump's rhetorical style, because his tissue of "threads" is so chaotic and irregular — though as I wrote in 2015,

Overall, I think the passage is entirely comprehensible, and in the context of the speech as a whole, even eloquent. The false starts and parentheticals may actually make the speech better, at least for people who are open to liking Trump and endorsing his ideas, by giving an impression of enthusiasm and genuineness.

As I've noted before, there are some better metaphors for this discourse style in a 19th-century poem by Arthur Hugh Clough:

Spare me, O mistress of Song! nor bid me remember minutely
All that was said and done o'er the well-mixed tempting toddy;
How were healths proposed and drunk 'with all the honours,'
Glasses and bonnets waving, and three-times-three thrice over,
Queen, and Prince, and Army, and Landlords all, and Keepers;
Bid me not, grammar defying, repeat from grammar-defiers
Long constructions strange and plusquam-Thucydidean;
Tell how, as sudden torrent in time of speat in the mountain
Hurries six ways at once, and takes at last to the roughest,
Or as the practised rider at Astley's or Franconi's
Skilfully, boldly bestrides many steeds at once in the gallop,
Crossing from this to that, with one leg here, one yonder,
So, less skilful, but equally bold, and wild as the torrent,
All through sentences six at a time, unsuspecting of syntax,
Hurried the lively good-will and garrulous tale of Sir Hector.

Trump is a teetotaler, but many others over the years have associated Trump's speeches with "the well-mixed tempting toddy" — see the many skits from 2015 linked here, where comedians lip-sync his recordings in the persona of "your drunk neighbor", "some wasted guy", "your drunk frat bro", etc. And there's an MSNBC news interview with John McWhorter in 2019, "Linguis[...]