A Golden Age for Linguistics

... well, at least a Golden Couple of Months!

What Language Experts Find So Strange About Donald Trump
Politicians use big words. Trump does not.
When ThinkProgress asked University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Yoffe Liberman about Trump’s speech, he decided to do a rough comparison to another presidential candidate: Jeb Bush. We sent him the transcripts of both Trump and Bush’s announcement speeches, plus some press conferences and one-on-one interviews.

What he found was that Bush talks, predictably, like most politicians. His most-used words are rather big and policy-like — “strategy,” “government,” “president,” and “American” all placed in his list of top 13 words. Six out of those 13 are one syllable, like “growth” and “state.” His favorite word is “the.”

Trump, on the other hand, leaned away from multiple-syllable words and stuck with low-brow, simple vocabulary. His first most-used word was “I,” and his fourth favorite was “Trump.” The report found that eight of his top 13 words were monosyllabic, and the words that had two syllables were the words “very” and “China.”