26th June 2025
Three recent turns-of-phrase are perhaps worth a comment before they are forgotten.
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The first is from Elon Musk, about the “big beautiful” tax bill before Congress:
The phrase which caught the eye was “disgusting abomination”.
You see, abominations are inherently disgusting.
Either the bill is “disgusting” or it is an “abomination”, but there is no need to say both.
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The second is also from Elon Musk:
The key phrase here is “entire corpus of”.
Either “entirety of” or “corpus of” would have done, but again there is no need to say both.
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The third is from Donald Trump:
“Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
Here saying “obliterated” would have been enough.
Saying “completely” – though intended to intensify only weakened the impact of “obliterated”.
Adding “totally” as a further intensifier weakened it yet further.
There was no need to say all three words.
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All of these examples show a lack of attention to what words mean.
Each example is by itself unexceptional, almost trivial. We all make mistakes, etc – and this blog is not perfect, etc.
But taken together, with scores of other similar examples from Trump, Musk and other senior figures in the United States administration, it shows a casual relationship between words and the things those words describe.
Words are just for effect.
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Trump emphasising “completely and totally” indeed suggested a lack of confidence that the facilities had indeed been “obliterated”.
A lack of confidence which accorded with later news reports:
Trump did not take this correction well and so, despite his ‘free speech’ postures, he called for the journalist to be sacked:
(Note the “like a dog”.)
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One purpose of this blog is to send postcards from the here-and-now, so that there is documentation of how things seemed at the time.
And at this time, many politicians use words – like a real-life version of Artificial Intelligence slop – with little or no correspondence to meaning.
Perhaps politicians have always done this – and no doubt one or two will want to reply to this post saying so.
But it has now got to the stage where one can instantly dismiss what is being said because the politician is saying too much.
Had Trump said the facilities had been obliterated, it may have perhaps seemed credible.
But the addition of both intensifiers immediately discredited the proposition.
And so any useful meaning was, well, obliterated.
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From the satirical site “The Borowitz Report” on Tuesday:
‘A little vocab lesson for Trump: “obliterated” is not a mildly damaged nuclear site—it’s Hegseth after happy hour.’
It’s all about avoiding hyperbole and oten even of some adverbs. Of the Trumpian example ading a hyperbole which just weakens your point. Judge’s do it all the time: ‘I am wholly convinced…’; ‘I find without hesitation’ etc.
“But it has now got to the stage where one can instantly dismiss what is being said because the politician is saying too much.”
That’s not correct. It may raise a doubt but, particularly in the case of Trump, just because the statement is hyperbolic does not mean it isn’t also true. One can make an accurate statement in a histrionic way.
Although of course without a doubt that is a wildly inappropriate, illogically absurd state of affairs.
I can'[t help thinking that Grok has “advanced reasoning” is a bit of a stretch.
Surely, it doesn’t reason, it regurgitates.
At the risk of taking us slightly off-topic, in the last month or two I’ve found myself wondering about many of President Trump’s public comments for a very different reason.
In his first term his on-camera comments were genuinely worrying: not simply for the narcissism, but for his rambling, stream-of-consciousness diatribes. If you’d like an amusing reminder, go back and enjoy some of the output from US comedian Sarah Cooper, who shot to fame thanks to her inspired lip-synching of some of President Trump’s first term comments. (Try the “Shorts” section of her YouTube channel – and enjoy “How to Medical”).
Fast-forward to immediately before the only (2024) debate attended by Joe Biden and you might recall that then Donald Trump was very vocal about his concern that Biden may have been taking performance-enhancing drugs and, “I say he’ll come out all jacked up, right?”, in a reference to stimulants.
However, one of the other things we’ve learned about President Trump since the 2016 campaign is his tendency towards projection – towards accusing his perceived opponents of the tactics he himself uses.
I appreciate this is mighty thin as evidence goes and certainly not something I’d want to offer as a case before a judge… but I keep coming back to the inescapable conclusion that, in fact, President Trump appears more mentally alert in 2025 than he did at any point during his first term. Of course I could easily be wrong – I’m happy to concede that my memory could be defective.
But I happen to think he’s actually far more coherent now than he was four year ago. Which just leaves me concerned about side effects.
Surely the real issue is not the words Trump uses, but the fact that he is a well-known liar who believes (apparently correctly) that if you repeat a lie often enough, many will accept it as the truth
David… I think we can all agree with you there… but there are a couple of dimensions to this. First, even Republicans concede that Trump lies.. but when his die-hard supporters are asked about this by reporters, their answer is to shrug and say, “All politicians lie, at least Trump has some fun with it…”
The second and slightly less flippant observation is to think about his experience in real estate. When he sold a property, Trump almost certainly operated on the basis that he was unlikely to be dealing with a repeat customer… so I could envisage his tall stories being polished as he induced people to buy an apartment or a duplex in one of his buildings. Perhaps it’s possible that Trump is stuck in his ways and just reliant upon his facts-don’t-matter shtick that he used to use with potential customers and now deploys for his faithful.
The MAGA base, let’s face it, have been dumped on for years by both parties. They’re desperate for anyone who promises to tear down the Washington elites, because as far as they can see, DC is one big pile of corruption. So they have become so invested in President Trump’s lies, they want to believe the lies, to the extent they will ignore the truth when offered it. Or, as Hilary Clinton put it – the Republican Party has become a cult and most members will need to go through de-programming when President Trump finally steps down from power.
Your point on the relation between unconsidered language and lack ir underlying thought is well made. You, and most readers, will be well aware of George
Orwell’s remarks on the issue but I would like to draw to your attention the novella “Our Gang” by Philip Roth, featuring Trick E Dixon which is essentially a discussion of the same idea from the early 70’s.
My favourite political “tell” for decades now is the phrase “of course”, which (like “common sense”) helpfully indicates where the speaker wishes to skate over a gap in evidence or reasoning.
Ouch.
“As a matter of fact . . .”
I recommend George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”. Actually I recommend George Orwell generally right now.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/
Agree with you, David. I think there is Shakespeare line about protesting too much, which just about fits Trumpie and his slicked down lapdog Hesketh (but can a lapdog be slicked down?) What amuses me about the US strikes is commentators who point out that there is no way of knowing its effectiveness but then proceed to give their opinion anyway!
Catachresis, ie misuse or over-extension of word meanings, has been going on for millennia. Cicero complained about such things. It begets a requirement for tautological modifiers, when you wish to make clear that you mean a word with its earlier, stronger meaning.
When so many people say “obliterate” to mean “damage”, you may feel the need to say “totally obliterate” to clarify that you really mean “obliterate”. But as it becomes common – for it is now common – to say “totally obliterate”, that phrase itself suffers catachresis. So people commonly – for it is now common – say “completely and totally obliterate” to reinforce their intention. That was plainly Trump’s intention. Whether it is true is not a matter of linguistics. As the phrase is now so common, I find it hard to be believe its choice reveals anything about its likelihood of being true.
And even “utter refutations” are normally only denials these days, to the extent that you’d better use the word “disprove” instead if that is what you can do.
Many excellent points made above especially by Derek Freyberg, Ben and Tristan Ward. However isn’t the issue we are all referring to merely the latest adaptation of behaviour to maximise the benefits obtainable from the ‘Attention Economy’? As many people have noted before Trump is merely one of the latest examples of people exploiting the gullibility and ignorance of others for personal gain; it’s a long tradition going back to hucksters, mountebanks, swindlers and charlatans through the ages.
Notable but not new. This is why history should be taught well.
If I remember my O level English correctly. this is about redundancy (in a grammatical sense)?