Updated 10 July.
In every US presidential election, there’s a point where the political reporting takes a linguistic turn, and the candidates’ language gaffes become a focus of attention. Every election match-up brings its own linguistic issues — most recently, it’s about Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s ages.
It seems only common sensical to probe their linguistic performances for evidence of cognitive decline and lack of fitness for office. But no matter what the issue is, this journalistic turn has a deeper history.
My first foray into this dynamic was in the context of the 2000 election between George W. Bush A and Al Gore. I was living in Texas when Bush was governor of the state, where in six years he’d never been considered a verbal blunderer. All that changed when he hit the national stage, after calling Greeks “Grecians,” substituting “malfeance” for “malfeasance,” and making some other colorful, well-publicized mistakes. For one group of voters, this called into question his intelligence and competence; for others it seemed like authentic folksiness (which Bush’s political handlers spun).
The question seemed to be, was Bush’s speaking normal? To answer this, I wrote a book that explored the natural history of verbal blundering (Um...: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean, 2007 (Pantheon)).
It turns out that the average, neurologically healthy speaker of English will make as many as seven to twenty-two slips of the tongue a day, based on an estimate of one slip per 1000 words. They’ll have about two to four moments per day when the right word or name comes embarrassingly slowly. This is the so-called “tip of the tongue” phenomenon. Moreover, about 5 to 8 percent of their words—if they’re not scripted or pre-rehearsed—will involve an “uh,” “um,” some other pause filler; a repeated sound, syllable, or word; a restarted sentence; or a repair. Finally, the average length of an utterance, at least in conversation, is three to four words.
Given these figures, the way Bush talked wasn’t unusual. It certainly didn’t have clinical import. But this doesn’t settle the matter at all, because there’s a deeper, underlying question. It has to do with whether or not the speaker—in that case, George W. Bush, but now Joe Biden and Donald Trump—is one of us. So we might ask, who is the “us” that he was to be included in or excluded from? Here a whole set of other observations reveal themselves.
For one thing, this sort of judgment is in the DNA of democracy. It dates back to a tradition that arose in ancient Athens in the third century BCE to teach people not to sound like dubious outsiders when they stood up to speak. Sounding like an outsider was discrediting to one’s ethos, or the authority that a person brought to their arguments.
Interestingly, the oldest handbooks on public speaking by luminaries like Cicero and Aristotle don’t mention verbal blunders or speech disfluencies, the maligned “uhs” and “ums” of contemporary public speaking — they had other linguistic markers of outsiderness. Our own rhetorical traditions of modernity didn’t equate excellent speaking with smooth, fluent speaking, not until mass media and recording technologies gave us new ways to idealize linguistic performances.
For audiences listening to orators who didn’t have microphones — think of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, for instance— a lack of volume would have marked a bad speaker. So would not pausing at the right moment, as much for emphasis as to take in the air they needed to project their voices. In a nation whose fragile union was underlined by “sectional” pronunciation, the speaking style of the intelligent, cultivated classes was preferred as the “standard” language. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that Bush-style verbal gaffes and other blunders would mark the dangerous outsider. Before then, they were invisible.
In this way, our expectations about what “we” sound like has varied a lot over the centuries, which hasn’t always been reflected in our expectations about our political leaders’ speech. For most of American history, very few Americans knew what congresspeople and senators, much less presidents, actually sounded like. It's unlikely that the Founding Fathers would have survived in contemporary media-driven politics. The polymath Thomas Jefferson, for instance, who lacked for nothing to talk about, had a public speaking style that was deemed “guttural and inarticulate.” He disliked public speaking so much that he wrote out his State of the Union addresses and sent them to Congress, where a clerk read them aloud.
Calvin Coolidge was the first American president whose voice was broadcast on the radio, but he forbade reporters from quoting him verbatim (as did Harry Truman). Once, during a weekly informal meeting with reporters, Coolidge caught a reporter taking notes while he was talking and chewed him out. “I don’t object to you taking notes as to what I say,” Coolidge said, “but I don’t quite throw my communications to the conference into anything like finished style or anything that perhaps would naturally be associated with a presidential utterance.”
(All this is in Um..., by the way.)
Coolidge had wisely sensed that appearing informal, in that fraught transfer from speech to text, would have political implications. Reporters were willing to play along for time. But once they dipped their toes in gonzo waters, they began quoting politicians with every pause, repetition, and stumble intact. In the early 1990s, Maureen Dowd pioneered the verbatim in portraits of George H.W. Bush which had the effect of making him seem dithering.
As standards shifted, technology enabled new attitudes. David Broder, the dean of Washington political reporting, explained to me that before reporters had cheap, portable recording devices, they’d gather after an event to discuss what they’d heard, then arrive at a consensus representation. By contrast, recording devices allowed them to work autonomously, transcribing what they decided their recorders had picked up. They might check their transcriptions against official ones, which are themselves “cleaned up” by stenographers, but this cleaning is done according to rules that are more situational than absolute.
Once journalists had verbatim quoting as a tool, they could wield it to show how politicians actually talk. Of course, no one likes to see their speaking transcribed verbatim—the number of pauses, stammers, and disfluencies can be shocking. That’s how “normal” speaking, especially in conversation, looks when it’s written down. Because it takes a lot to convince people otherwise, when the verité style is deployed in journalism and commentary, it can erode an image of power. Such a speaker doesn’t seem like one of us.
Political reporting always seems to like to have one linguistic punching bag on hand. When I was researching my book, a Lexis-Nexis search revealed that no articles labeling George W. Bush as a verbal blunderer appeared until after potatoe-speller Dan Quayle had left the race.
This opened a new dimension in political reporting, which favors match-ups in which candidates are dramatic foils. You can see that in some language-flavored headlines about Trump and Biden from November. An ABC News headline from Nov. 1 read, “Trump, who mocks Biden's age and gaffes, deals with blunders of his own.” “Trump’s verbal slip-ups threaten his argument about Biden,” went a Nov. 2 CNN headline. All of it was preceded on October 30 by the New York Times, “How Trump’s Verbal Slips Could Weaken His Attacks on Biden’s Age.” Most recently, Michael Tomasky wrote in The New Republic about Trump's cognitive weakness.
However, the linguistic drama isn’t necessarily where you think. For supporters of George W. Bush, the linguistic foil was not actually the monumentally eloquent Al Gore but Bill Clinton, who had demonstrated the dangers of slippery-tongued self-interest. As I wrote, the choice in 2000 was clear: “a thick-tongued man whose values you can admire is preferable to a silver-tongued man who, as in the Flannery O’Connor story, seduces you in the hayloft, then runs off with your wooden leg.”
When the linguistic turn happens in journalistic coverage of presidential elections, we ought to remember that it’s not strictly about the language someone uses. That is, it’s not about language per se. So what is it about?
For one thing, it’s about what it means to sound like “one of us.” That’s why pointing about what’s normal, or how the definition of the normal has changed over time, doesn’t really work. And that’s why talking about what’s normal for men of those ages to sound like doesn’t matter, either. In most instances, people have already decided what they think about each other, and what they think of political candidates simply reflects that.
But in 2024, I think it's about something else: a desire for a “normal” presidential politics, one where this question of “who sounds like one of us” is urgent, but whose urgency also has a cozy familiarity to it, no matter what the answer is. Where the political journalists can do what they've always done, slipping out the old tropes.
But the politics aren't normal. Not this year, anyway.
Update: I decided to add some more to this post, given the current fallout from Biden's disastrous debate performance on 1 July. Many major media outlets, including The New York Times and the Washington Post, have shown themselves to be heavily biased in their hectoring coverage of the two candidates on the basis of their speaking style. Trump's frantic, over-the-top mendaciousness and inflammatory dangerousness are consistently overlooked in favor of castigating Biden's lapses of attention and hoarseness during the debate. (I realize there's another aspect to the dynamic about trust that I'm not going to get into.) I'm not weighing in on the question of whether or not Biden should drop out; I'm merely interested in how the media invest their attention to matters of linguistic and cognitive performance. What's happening now is more than a linguistic turn; it reflects a society's profound inability to grapple with its own fears about mental decline, by trying to maintain some semblance of normal horse-race type of coverage. If we were really able to comprehend aging, both of these guys would have been hounded out months ago, and the howls against both would be deafening now.
