Let’s Fix America With Grammar
In the MAGAsphere, sloppy language leads to foolish thoughts, and much worse.
This week, a niece messaged me about a sentence in a children’s book. She sent a photo that showed a whimsical drawing of a pink dog above the line “I wish my dog were pink.”
She asked if that should have been “I wish my dog was pink.”
I replied that the subjunctive mood in English is little understood and pretty much gone now — given that the language follows speech rather than writing — and noted, jokingly, that I wish more Americans were better educated.
My quip naturally made me recall Donald Trump’s 2015 campaign comment about how he loves the poorly educated.
Trump loves the poorly educated because he can rely on them to not understand civics and to fall for his ceaseless lies and grifting. He is smugly confident that they will also look past his many, many deficiencies as a president and a human being. Did he not brag that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters?
He knows that he can blather about anything at all — that he will bring prescription drug prices down by 1,500%, that his war with Iran was an unbelievable victory, that the 2020 election was stolen from him with fraudulent votes — and not be considered by his loyal followers the utter fool the whole world considers him.
Trump has helpers, real or artificial intelligence-based, occasionally stepping in, but most of his rants on his social media site with the bullshit name are rife with misspellings and grammatical errors. Of course, one can still pick up the low-level understanding of grammar and general inarticulateness from the actual speech of Trump. The same goes for many of his underlings, like the third-grade-level rantings of Pete Hegseth (incredibly, the secretary of defense of the United States).
AI cannot fix any of that.
And no one should blame it on his rapidly aging brain; Trump has always struggled with the English language, even the New York version. He is cunning, not intelligent — something he unwittingly proves every time he claims that passing a basic mental competency test shows how brilliant he is. At 80, Trump is simply becoming a more concentrated version of himself, with ever-wilder dreams of grandeur.
As reported in “Regime Change,” a book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump has latched on to the idea that he is the biggest man of history — greater than the likes of the most infamous Roman emperors, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler.
His gushing about being another Napoleon allows me to note that a couple of years ago I suggested the only way to handle Donald Trump was to exile him to a nice island somewhere.
In 2015, he infamously claimed, “I’m very highly educated. I know words. I have the best words.” That was hilarious (in a horrifying way — this was, after all, an actual candidate for the U.S. presidency) because he proved himself wrong, multiple times, within that simple statement.
More recently, the Man With The Best Words spun off a thousand memes by saying at a press conference, “Nothing bad can happen; it can only good happen.”
Getting back to the was or were question, let’s learn a bit more about the subjunctive mood before we, too, become more concentrated versions of ourselves and lose the ability to gather new information.
Using the subjunctive verb correctly in all languages can be tricky, but journalists mostly put it to use in contrary-to-fact statements. The Associated Press Stylebook gives this advice, with examples:
“Use the subjunctive mood of a verb for contrary-to-fact conditions, and expressions of doubts, wishes or regrets.”
Obviously, given that the subjunctive mood is used in contrary-to-fact statements, Trump and his pitiful kakistocracy are giving it a real workout.
- If Donald Trump were the great deal-maker he incessantly claims to be [he is decidedly not], he would not have withdrawn from the nuclear treaty President Obama and John Kerry established with Iran, along with other world powers; he would have built upon it.
- If the United States were the “hottest” country Trump keeps embarrassingly claiming [U.S. News and World Report countries’ rankings has the U.S. at #18], why are so many smart and successful people leaving to find a better quality of life, and why do our historic allies, like Canadians, no longer trust us?
- If Donald Trump were the greatest president in American history, as he ludicrously claims to be, why would scholars and historians — even Republicans — rank Trump very near the bottom or dead last?
It gets a bit tricky when you use a negative. (With Donald Trump, everything is at least a double-negative, or a black hole):
- If Donald Trump were not both a convicted felon and a convicted sexual predator, he might be more believable when he says he broke things off with his BFF (seemingly the only soulmate he’s had in his life), convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Does that help?
It says much about Americans that many consider knowing basic grammar to be “intellectual.” As opposed to about half of the people in the world, who are bilingual, most of us know only one language — and even then, only kinda-sorta.
There’s a reason the Epstein class and the oligarch bros are more than happy to see Trump demolish the Department of Education.
One of the most cogent explanations of why that is came from comedian George Carlin, who, were he still with us, would pace the stage and say something quite like this:
“They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street….”
Carlin would not be at all surprised that our children’s generation faces corporate heads gleefully replacing human workers with AI. And his remarks — the comedian died in 2008 — show how long the Republicans have been dreaming of robbing us of Medicare and Social Security. As he said, it was old news then.
The Oligarch overlords want to convince you that being educated is somehow unmanly.
Trump said he loved the poorly educated because his Dark Triad deceit as a con man relies on them. In addition, our oligarch overlords want to convince young men that being educated is somehow unmanly. They think we should be pleased as putsch — er, punch — to see someone like Melania Trump as first lady, when all her modern-era predecessors were highly educated and accomplished.
They want you to be stupid enough to fear socialism, meaning the things we agree to share the cost of, like public parks, schools, and libraries; sidewalks, roads, highways, and public transportation; national parks; and, say, the Department of Defense, rather than their gleefully ruthless brand of predatory capitalism.
If only more Democrats were clever enough to counter the right’s baseless shouts of socialism with their own calm explanations of the dire effects on our country of predatory capitalism and Trumpian corruption.
In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell wrote,
“[The English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts… if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
Trump’s language is ugly and inaccurate (to say the least) not only because he wants to speak to the common American, but also because his thoughts are lazy and entirely self-serving.
The man who, again, thinks cognitive tests are the same as intelligence tests proves nearly every hour of every day (often in the wee hours) what Orwell wrote — that “the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
So, let’s learn a bit more about grammar, about constructing coherent sentences, which will lead to more coherent thinking. Grab your old Strunk and White or check out “The Elements of Style” online, bookmark The Free Dictionary, sign up for email from The Daily Grammar.
In this dismal conspiracy-addled era of Trump, Fox News, and their malign spawn, it is one positive way to fight back and retain (or regain) your sanity.
Language matters — despots go after journalists first because they are trained to seek the truth and make it plain for their readers. Soon after, wannabe authoritarians attack the comedians, essayists, playwrights, and poets.
Remember, if we all learn a bit more and become more articulate, nothing bad can happen; it can only good happen — for ourselves and for our democracy.
