It's a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word, which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good,’ for instance. If you have a word like ‘good,’ what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well – better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good,’ what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words – in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?
In Orwell's 1984, Newspeak is the controlled language of the Party. As explained in the quote above, Newspeak attempts to limit the range of thought by restricting the vocabulary. The idea is that a narrowing of the range of available words results in a narrowing of the potential complexity of the concept conveyed by those words.
But what if reducing the vocabulary was not actually necessary to narrow the thought or concept conveyed by words? What if the narrowing could occur without actually removing any words from the language?
What if the entire range of description, of goodness and badness, of any praise or criticism, could be limited to strongly positive to strongly negative (essentially "doubleplusgood" to "doubleplusungood"), regardless of how many words the speaker used, or what those words were?
There has been a lot of discussion lately about whether all of the false statements made by Trump actually constitute “lying”. I think it may be accurate to say he isn't lying, because I'm not sure that what he does could even be considered "speaking" English in the usual sense.
The problem isn't that people keep taking what Trump says at face-value. The problem is that people are trying to use the words coming out of his month as a basis for determining what Trump is "saying" to begin with. In TrumpSpeak, there are essentially only two things that are ever “said”:
1. "I am the best!"
2. "My enemies are the worst!"
If you listen to a Trump statement and come away thinking there was an intended meaning other than one of those two things, you are probably wrong. His brain figures out the best way to say "I am the best!" in a certain situation/environment, his mouth says those words, and that is the end. That's the whole process. He typically incorporates his awesomeness into the topic at hand, but the actual words used are meaningless, and will only come up again if the situation indicates that they once again convey the meaning of "I am the best!". And I’m not sure if he is technically lying in claiming that he believes he is the best (Comment below has convinced me that he probably is).
He has three main ways of saying, "I am the best!"
The first, and most common, is when he pretty much openly says "I am the best!"
For instance:
Nobody knows more about taxes than I do, maybe in the history of the world.
I have the best temperament or certainly one of the best temperaments of anybody that’s ever run for the office of president. Ever.
(Side note: Fuck me, how did we let this guy become President?)
The second is pretty similar, but slightly less direct. He makes a positive statement with a not-at-all subtle implication that he was responsible for it.
Here's an example from this week:
Happy Memorial Day! Those who died for our great country would be very happy and proud at how well our country is doing today. Best economy in decades, lowest unemployment numbers for Blacks and Hispanics EVER (& women in 18years), rebuilding our Military and so much more. Nice!
(Additional side note: Again, how the fuck did this happen?)
Most people generally understand what is happening in the first two situations, and no one takes these very seriously.
It's the third type of "I am awesome!" that seems to give people trouble. This is where everyone thinks they are seeing behind the curtain or getting a peak into his mindset. These are the situations where even critics believe that Trump is using words the way that humans typically use them.
For instance:
People will just believe you. You just tell them and they believe you.
You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.
Here's the thing. These statements really should not be taken any more literally than the previous ones. Trump isn't "confessing" to anything. His brain was searching for a string of words to convince Billy Bush that he was awesome, and those are what it settled on. Same thing with Lesley Stahl.
Does he believe these things? Maybe. But it's also possible that he never even considered those particular lines of thought prior to saying them.
It's very possible that claiming to have great ratings was just his way of saying "I am the best!" each time he said it, and he never gave any thought whatsoever to why he was saying it. Once Billy Bush questioned it, "You just tell them and they believe you" became the new best way of explaining his awesomeness — I mean, who could be better than someone who can say whatever he wants and have people believe him?
His brain is basically a computer program that tries to say "I am the best!" using a huge range of word combinations. For any given statement, the words have no meaning to him...they are just chosen because his brain has determined, in that instant, that this particular combination of words is the best method to express his awesomeness to his particular audience.
THERE IS NOTHING BEHIND THE CURTAIN.
You can sometimes glean information from his quotes, since they are useful indicators of what Trump believes to represent awesomeness at a given time, but it is a mistake to treat his words as normal human communications.
How has he been able to get away with this major defect? I’ll try to write more about this in a follow-up post, but I think it is because a sizable population of this country “understands” him when he speaks this way, except they don’t quite hear, “I am the best!”, what they hear is “We are the best!” (Or “You are the best!”). Not everyone, not even all of his supporters, but enough of them.
That's why they don't care that he "lies" - they know what he was really “saying”, and don’t like being told that maybe they aren’t actually the best.
Edit: I wrote a Part 2, available here.