articulation

To call a person “articulate” is to say something rather complex. One element of articulateness is the quick and easy summoning of words — but if the words summoned are not appropriate, we don’t call the person articulate but rather a chatterer, a windbag, a babbler. We call what comes out of their mouth “word salad.” Appropriate words are precise and also information-rich. The articulate person is able to speak fluently but also to the point. 

I say all this by way of noting something curious: The current Presidential candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, are surely the least articulate Presidential candidates in American history — the least able to speak in reliably coherent complete sentences, the least likely to summon relevant information in discussing a topic, and most prone to extended and expansive servings of word salad. 

During the 2020 Presidential campaign a meme arose comparing Biden and Trump to Kennedy and Nixon debating in 1960, and sure enough, if you listen to the 1960 debates it’s astonishing how … well, articulate both men are. They navigate their way smoothly from subject to verb to object in every sentence; they have massive amounts of information at their fingertips. The only Presidential candidate of this century who wouldn’t sound foolish in their company is Barack Obama. 

Sixty years ago, and throughout previous American history before that, a certain level or articulateness was thought essential to Presidential leadership. Not everyone had it in the same degree, or was articulate in the same way — Lincoln and William Jennings Bryan, for instance, both used biblical cadences, but Lincoln was straightforward and measured (in his high-pitched voice) while Bryan was an orotund thunderer. Calvin Coolidge was notoriously laconic, but terseness can be a form of articulateness also; his style of speech was essential to his self-presentation. Only someone like Eisenhower, whose appeal to the American people was grounded in something wholly other than his command of language, could get away with being a poor speaker. 

The one great exception to this rule, at least if H. L. Mencken is to be trusted, was Warren G. Harding. The “G.” stands, remarkably enough, for Gamaliel, and Mencken insisted that Harding spoke in an idiolect best called Gamalielese. 

I have earned most of my livelihood for twenty years past by translating the bad English of a multitude of authors into measurably better English. Thus qualified professionally, I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and half a dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. 

Such linguistic incompetence was noteworthy at the time; now it’s the norm. We may only choose between pish and posh, between flap and doodle, between balder and weave. 

The question is: How did we get here? How did we get to the point at which our Presidential candidates are actually less articulate than the average person? How did we manage to create a Presidential campaign season which resembles nothing so much as a pack of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights? 

I dunno. But I have one theory: To speak articulately, in an age in which one’s every utterance is recorded and analyzed, is to court refutation and correction. Perhaps this is evolutionarily adaptive behavior for politicians: nobody can call you out if you just hang the tattered washing on the line. 

Or maybe we’ve just ceased to care about anything being done well. So let’s enjoy the word salad while we can. Because we’re about three elections away from Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. Though, come of think of it, President of America Camacho is pretty articulate, in his own distinctive way.