Good words and bad choices

‘I know words, I have the best words’ Trump boasted in a 2015 speech, and the internet’s scoffed at the irony ever since. Silly old Trump, right? Perhaps. But there’s another irony too. By sharing his quote so widely, we’ve also shown that in some sense, he is good with words. As Cardiff Garcia points out, ‘Trump’s … language — simple, visual, repetitive, bellicose — fits so well into [our] new’ era of media.

So what are Trump’s ‘best words’? He actually gives us an example of his preferred lingo in the same paragraph as his ‘I know words’ comment:

‘[Obama says] one of [his] achievements for the year is bringing peace to Syria and the whole world is talking about it. It is – the level of stupidity is incredible. I’m telling you, I used to use the word incompetent. Now I just call them stupid. I went to an Ivy League school. I’m very highly educated. I know words. I have the best words. I have the be – there is no better word than stupid.’

I think Trump’s right: stupid is better than incompetent. For starters, it’s simpler. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge warned, ‘whatever is translatable in other and simpler words of the same language, without loss of sense or dignity, is bad.’ One reason for that, though there are many others, is that simpler words are easier for listeners to digest, getting the message across better.

Another reason Trump’s right is that ‘stupid’ has some real wallop. To call someone incompetent sounds clever and patronising, but it still suggests they could learn something. Stupid bites deeper: it says they’re useless to the core. The word’s a gleeful mallet of condemnation.

Which is why Trump’s also wrong. There aren’t ‘best’ words, only apt ones, and ‘stupid’ is embarrassingly inapt. Obama et al. didn’t deserve such flattening damnation. Maybe they were rashly optimistic, or held worldviews that were too inflexible. Maybe they were trapped by their campaign promises of ending wars, or were too timid to get involved in them. But whatever was the case, Trump’s ‘stupid’ barges through these complications, unhelpful and wrong.

Why Trump succeeded and why Trump's failing,
all in one graph

Ultimately, Trump’s inapt because he’s a lazy thinker. Einstein said that ‘everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.’ For Trump, though, everything must be reduced to stupid, great and sad. He doesn’t care to choose the right word, and probably couldn’t anyway. His message works on the internet and at rallies because it’s simple and rude, memorable and shareable. But its crudeness is the very reason it’s proving useless in Washington. It’s inapt, too simplistic for a complex world.

See it, say it, obfuscate it

The London Metropolitan Police is running a campaign that encourages the public to report stuff that looks suspicious. Their slogan goes ‘See it, say it, sorted’. That’s dodgy already. After ‘see it’ and ‘say it’, ‘sorted’ sounds like ‘sort it’—and the last thing the police want is civvies mugging odd-looking people.

But the daft thing is that the Met’s messaging amplifies this ambiguity. Every few minutes, London stations broadcast a message that goes: ‘If you see something that doesn't look right, speak to staff or text the British transport police on 61016. We'll sort it. See it, say it, sorted.’ So: see it, speak it, sort it?

I know these verbal blunders aren’t likely to cause harm. But they're also reeeeally preventable. Which, incidentally, is pretty much the Met's message too. A better station announcement might be this: ‘If you see something that doesn't look right, say something to staff or text the British transport police on 61016. They’ll get it sorted. See it, say it, sorted.’ Bosh.

My blog's name doesn't work

It took me weeks to think of a name for this blog, and I spent most of that time circling around bad ideas like a stick caught in an eddy. Then one night ‘essay essence’ flew into my head and I just knew I’d got it. ‘Essay essence’ was a neat summary of the blog’s purpose (explaining articles and books). It was a charming image, as if distilling articles would produce something precious and tasty — like vanilla essence. And it was eloquent, a pair of two-syllable words with complimentary ‘ess’ sounds.

The best laid plans o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley, mused Robert Burns. And so they do. The name’s a flop. The blog’s no longer about explaining books and articles. No one understands the nice essence-distilling idea until I explain it. But most annoyingly, people don’t even hear the words right. The sibilance smudges the syllables, and even when people hear the sounds correctly they think I’ve said ‘SA essence’. What the hell would SA be anyway?! Of course, people understand the name if they see it written. But if they hear it, it’s a failure the moment the esses leave my lips.

That said, I’m still not changing the damn name until I think of something better.

So, ‘essay grooming’?
N.B. SAGrooming, which I pass every day,
highlights the ‘SAG’ bit in red on their posters.