When I was in graduate school, studying communication disorders, I took a couple of linguistics classes.
In one of them, the professor made us endlessly analyze and diagram sentences. I remember that it was confusing at first, but later I learned to love the clarity that it gave me about how people were thinking.
I used the skills from that class in my two decades of work as a speech/language pathologist. Sentence analysis can help to diagnose both language disorders and thought disorders.
RawStory reports that late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel tried to analyze several sentences from a speech. This wouldn’t be a crazy idea if the speech had been given by an average American, or even by your typical American politician.
This speech was delivered by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, also known as the “Man Who Mangled the Language.” The garbled speech was delivered in Pennsylvania, and was supposed to be focused on Hillary Clinton and young voters.
Trump’s staff even gave him a nine sentence script which they told the press he would be reading. Unfortunately for his handlers, it took the candidate a full 25 minutes to ramble his way to the end of the speech.
One section of the manic rant was so convoluted that the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” staff wrote it down verbatim on a chalkboard. Just like my graduate school professor, they asked Kimmel to make sense of it.
Here’s the whole section of the speech as it was written on the chalkboard:
“People are negotiating and owners of companies are negotiating to move your companies out to Mexico and other places. You watch. And it’s getting worse, it’s not getting better, it’s getting worse. And you’re unsuspecting right now. You say to your wife: ‘Let’s go to a movie after Trump.’ But you won’t do that because you’ll be so high and so excited that no movie is going to satisfy you. Okay? No movie. You know why? Honestly? Because they don’t make movies like they used to—is that right?”
Huh??? In graduate school I would have just put my head down and cried.
Watch the video and see what Kimmel did with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJCpjc4_h78
Featured image via YouTube screengrab.
