- Biden has started using ‘chunks’ of language and confusing ‘social levels’
- Top linguist calls lack of effective communication ‘alarming’
Joe Biden’s verbal skills have deteriorated so dramatically that one of America’s top linguists has compared the president’s current speech to Pidgin English.
Biden made two major blunders in Washington on Thursday alone: he accidentally called Volodymyr Zelensky “President Putin” and referred to Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump” during his press conference.
And these rapid slips (Biden corrected the first, but not the second) are part of a troubling and rapidly diminishing problem, it is claimed.
John McWhorter, a New York Times columnist and a linguist at Columbia University, says the 81-year-old president’s slurred speech reminds him of pidgin, a blend of two or more languages.
“I was reminded of this as the nation tried to process President Biden’s jumbled sentence structure during his debate with Donald Trump and in his subsequent interview with George Stephanopoulos,” writes McWhorter, an expert on creoles, pidgins and other “vehicular languages” who teaches at Columbia University. Center for American Studies.
Leading linguist compares Biden’s short phrases and missing cues to ‘social levels’ of English to compare the way he speaks to pidgin languages
McWhorter says he’s struck by “how far (Biden’s) sentences have strayed from the complexity and subtlety he once effortlessly mastered,” referring to interviews from four years ago.
“It’s alarming to see someone who’s asking to be elected president of the United States — someone who’s already president of the United States — communicating in such an ineffective way. But what’s actually happening there, linguistically? One way to understand what’s happening is to think of it as a disentanglement,” he writes in a New York Times opinion piece.
McWhorter points to Biden’s use of “chunks” of language, such as the use of truncated segments in his recent ABC interview, such as, “Large crowds, overwhelming response, no slip-ups.”
Biden’s bizarre statement that he would be OK as long as “I do the best job I can do” — a comment that was disputed and edited in an ABC transcript — also caught McWhorter’s attention, saying it reminded him of pidgin languages.
McWhorter noted comparisons between Biden’s speech and Pidgin English
Linguist John H. McWhorter was alarmed by some of Biden’s language usage
The president also mixes up the tenses of words, indicating that his command of the language “appears to be fading,” McWhorter writes.
These statements appear to be unrelated to Biden’s language problem, his stutter as a child, which he has largely overcome.
Ally Rep. James C. Clyburn (D-South Carolina) based his position on some of Biden’s disastrous performances.
“I’ve been dealing with this condition for a long time and I know exactly how it works, but he has one of the best minds I’ve ever known,” Clyburn said Friday on NBC’s “Today” show. “The people who dealt with him will tell you that, and so I hope we focus on the substance of this man, rather than these sometimes mispronounced words and phrases, and how he led this country.”
Biden’s press conference on Thursday night also saw him use his trademark whisper to emphasize his point, with some of his comments approaching a shout.
Biden, 81, isn’t the only candidate paring down ideas to their basics. During his own bizarre debate statement, in which he bragged about water quality and environmental activism during his own term, former President Donald Trump, 78, simply said, “H20.”
But in Biden’s case, McWhorter worries about the “rapid decline in complex sentence structures.”
“Pidgins do a basic job, but they’re not designed for detail, grace, or persuasion. Biden’s speech is increasingly being subjected to an alarmingly similar judgment,” he wrote.
McWhorter also admitted that while Trump is known for his verbal gaffes, he does a much better job of appearing coherent and in control of his thoughts than Biden.