Friday, January 12, 2018

“I have the best words”

On some journal posts [click], i wrote about words (language, semantics) and their relation to truth and reality. Accuracy, and honesty are important. What passes on local television as speech is dumbed down into advertising language to tease (the use of some words are nearly always wrong: “even”, “unthinkable”). Now we have another problem in quotation and translation. Donald, contrary to his stated “I have the best words”, certainly does not. His speech is middling elementary school. It is also publicly crude. His latest bon mot would not have been printable. Other men holding his current office, would use this language in private. When the Nixon tapes came out, the transcript was full of “expletive[s] deleted”. At the time, i had to go to the dictionary for “expletive”.  American journalism is almost forced to quote Trump verbatim. Non-English speaking countries are having to use equivalent terms: “agujeros de mierda”, “pays de merde”, “drecksloch”, “Bongoland”.  BUT, everyone knew this before the election.

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