Big Brother Trump

Je lis dans le Guardian, une évaluation sociolinguistique du langage de Trump, langage qui a toutes les caractéristiques du restricted code de Bernstein et, malheureusement, du newspeak d'Orwell. Je cite ces trois paragraphes, parfaitement explicites :

1) Trump uses a pretty small working vocabulary. This doesn’t seem to be a conscious strategy, though it works as well as if it had been. Much was made during primary season of the way in which reading-level algorithms (unreliable though they are) found his speeches pitched at fourth-grade level, ie the comprehension of an average nine-year-old.

2) His syntax, spelling and punctuation are – in conventional terms – a catastrophe. In his tweets, he is prone to run-on sentences, shouty capitalisations, unpresidented misspellings and malapropisms, quote marks used for emphasis and verbless exclamations. In speaking, he is prone to anacoluthon – sentences whose grammar collapses – and reflexive repetition.

3) The workhorses of his rhetoric are charged but empty adjectives and adverbs. Things are “great”, “wonderful”, “amazing”, “the best”, or they’re “crooked”, “fake”, “unfair”, “failing”. He sprinkles intensifiers liberally: “a very, very, very amazing man, a great, great developer”.

L'article est signé de Sam Leith, l'auteur d'un livre sur la rhétorique d'Aristote à Obama. Les Américains ont porté Big Brother au pouvoir [Cf l'article, "Relire Orwell" que j'ai écrit pour l'ouvrage collectif publié par Françoise Willmann, La science-fiction : entre Prométhée et Cassandre, aux Presses Universitaires de Nancy.] L'auteur témoigne ensuite de la manière dont Trump peut se contredire lui-même ou les "faits" sans en subir les conséquences. Sa conclusion porte sur une interrogation : où cela va-t-il nous mener ?

My hunch is that we have an electorate so used to politicians being equivocal, and so enraged by it, that the bounce Trump gets from not sounding like that is much bigger than the demerit he incurs for being a clouds-of-smoke-billowing-from-his-pants liar. We’d rather have an open liar, in other words, than a conventional politician. Let’s see how that works out.