每日一文20180530

    众所周知,现任美国总统川普大叔是个“大嘴巴”,喜欢tweet推特治国,喜怒无常,不按常理出牌。今天这篇文章通篇都在吐槽川普5年级水平的英文语法、拼写、不合逻辑……这样的总统真的是不仅是美国,也是世界史上的奇葩了!阅读文章要读出文章的语气tone,这是篇吐槽的文章,那么很多用词必然就比较negative负面。

Donald Trump's Twitter assault on the English language weakens him and America


One can only wish Donald Trump occasionally colluded商量,密谋 with a dictionary before tweeting. His garbled混乱的 grammar, punctuation and spelling damage America.

CHRISTIAN SCHNEIDER  |  OPINION COLUMNIST6:00 p.m. GMT+8 May 29, 2018

One must give President Trump credit where it is due: Arguing he is innocent of obstructing justice by threatening to fire the investigator looking into whether he obstructed justice is a novel strategy. It would be like an accused arsonist纵火犯 ordering a judge to find him innocent or he’ll burn her new car to the ground.

Yet while the president and investigators publicly wrangle争吵 over collusion, obstruction and “spying,” Trump continues his assault on something as valuable as democracy itself: the English language. As the president makes daily pronouncements on Twitter, one only wishes he occasionally colluded with a dictionary.

Surely, Trump’s supporters admire his willingness to defy蔑视、违抗 convention. But when proper grammar, punctuation and spelling are treated with more enmity敌意 than Vladimir Putin, it weakens America’s standing and undercuts削弱 the force of the president’s words.

A recent Boston Globe report suggested aides who post tweets on Trump’s behalf actually add garbled syntax句法, unnecessary exclamation points, and random capitalization to Trump’s posts just to make them sound like the president of the United States. “Some staff members even  relish享受 the scoldings Trump gets from elites社会精英 shocked by the Trumpian language they strive to imitate,” says the Globe report, “believing that debates over presidential typos排印错误 fortify增强 the belief within his base that he has the common touch.”

For one, the debate over “typos” isn’t necessarily one about misspellings or awkward punctuation. It is a well-grounded深入的,透彻的 concern that the most powerful man in the world often communicates to the world without any filter or prior review by his advisers. Certainly anyone on Twitter long enough will admit they have regretted sending certain tweets, but our inept不恰当的,笨拙的 postings likely won’t lead to a Syrian village being vaporized蒸发.

And granted诚然,的确, while one is unlikely to hear the Queen’s English being spoken at backyard cookouts户外烧烤 across America this summer, the president’s official statements should adhere to a basic standard of properness and decorum懂礼节. If the president aspired to渴望 be a “drain the swamp”-style rabble-rouser, it would be more palatable可接受 if he demonstrated a fifth-grade proficiency in language.

That’s not to say there wouldn’t be times where the president couldn’t defy language conventions, Tom Wolfe-style. But before one begins stuffing加入,塞满 prose with extraneous不相关的 exclamation points and random capitalization, they should at least master the basics first. International conflict is not the proper venue to feature Trump’s off-the-cuff即兴的 beat poetry.

Instead, Trump’s tweets (or at least the ones he writes) portray an undisciplined, capricious变化无常的,任性的 mind prone to容易 laziness and emotional outbursts. Take, for example, this gem from May 23, in which Trump tweeted:

“Look how things have turned around on the Criminal Deep State. They go after Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam, and end up getting caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before!”

One visualizes Trump breathlessly tapping the shift button on his phone to emphasize the words “Phony Collusion.” The capital “P” and “C” are simply too much for him to resist; finally, he gives in to temptation, as if the eye-popping uppercase characters are a porn star at a golf outing. His Ivy League education (recall his declarations that he has the “best words” and “a very good brain”) begs him to use his linguistic turn signals; but making letters bigger just feels … oh so right.

In Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, Huxley argues the role of the human brain is “eliminative排除、忽略:” the brain essentially serves as a referee裁判员, filtering all of the body’s senses and desires to allow humans to function. In the same way, proper use of language further distills吸取精华 the base emotions in the brain into an orderly, understandable stream of communication.

The inability of the most powerful person in the world to adhere to even basic linguistic rules — and to brag吹嘘,夸耀 about this lack of discipline! — should worry even Trump’s most ardent 热切的supporters. His lexical词汇的 lurches突然改变 toward whatever is on his mind that very second are a window into his unpredictable temperament and capricious突发奇想的,心血来潮的 judgment.

With his game of syntactical句法的 bumper cars, Trump highlights both the best and the worst of the American system of government. On the one hand, it demonstrates anyone can be president. On the other hand, it demonstrates that anyone can be president. Let’s just hope one day we find out he’s had an undisclosed未公开的 meeting with Merriam-Webster.

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