- Biden has begun using “snippets” of language and mixing up “social levels”
- Leading linguist calls lack of effective communication “alarming”
Joe Biden’s verbal skills have “disappeared” so dramatically that one of America’s top linguists has compared the president’s current speech to Pidgin English.
Biden made two major gaffes on Thursday alone in Washington: He accidentally called Volodymyr Zelensky “President Putin” and referred to Kamala Harris during his high-stakes news conference as “Vice President Trump.”
And these rapid lapses (Biden corrected the first, but not the second) have been argued to be part of a worrying and rapidly diminishing problem.
John McWhorter, a New York Times columnist and linguist at Columbia University, says the 81-year-old president’s garbled speech reminds him of pidgin, a mix of two or more languages.
“That’s been on my mind as the nation tries to process President Biden’s confusing syntax 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.
A leading linguist is comparing Biden’s short sentences and missing cues in the “social levels” of English to compare his speech to pidgin languages.
McWhorter says he’s struck by “how far (Biden’s) delivery has moved away from the complexities and subtleties he once so effortlessly controlled,” pointing to interviews from four years ago.
“It’s alarming to see someone who is running for president of the United States — someone who is already serving as president of the United States — communicate in such an ineffective way. But what’s really going on there, linguistically? One way to understand what’s happening is to think of it as falling apart,” he writes in a New York Times article. opinion article.
McWhorter points to Biden’s use of “snippets” of language, such as his use of clipped snippets in his recent ABC interview, such as “Big crowds, overwhelming response, no slip-ups.”
Biden’s odd statement that he would be fine as long as he “did the best job I know I can do” — a comment that was disputed and changed in an ABC transcript — also caught McWhorter’s attention. He said it made him think of pidgin languages.
McWhorter noted comparisons between Biden’s speech and pidgin English
Linguist John H. McWhorter was alarmed by some of the uses in Biden’s speech
The president also confuses verb tenses, showing that his command of language color “appears to be fading,” McWhorter writes.
These manifestations appear to be distinct from Biden’s speech problem while driving, his childhood stutter that he nearly overcame.
Ally Rep. James C. Clyburn (D-S.C.) leaned on that as the reason behind some of Biden’s disastrous performances.
“I’ve been in that situation for a long time and I know exactly how it works, but he has one of the most brilliant minds I’ve ever been around,” Clyburn said on NBC’s “Today” show Friday. “People who have been around him will tell you that, so I hope we focus on the essence of this man, rather than these sometimes misspoken words and phrases, and how he has led this country.”
Biden’s Thursday night news conference also included the use of his signature whisper to underscore a point, with some of his comments bordering on shouting.
Biden, 81, is not the only candidate to boil ideas down to their most basic. During his own bizarre debate statement, boasting about water quality and environmentalism during his own term, former President Donald Trump, 78, said simply: “H2O.”
But in Biden’s case, McWhorter worries about the “rapid decline of complex sentence structure.”
“Pidgins serve a basic function, but they are not designed for detail, grace, or persuasion. Increasingly, Biden’s speech is subject to an alarmingly similar judgment,” he wrote.
McWhorter also admitted that while Trump is known for his own verbal gaffes, he does a much better job than Biden of appearing coherent and in control of his thoughts.