"Words and Things"

A comment on three recent turns-of-phrase by Donald Trump and Elon Musk

Three recent turns-of-phrase are perhaps worth a comment before they are forgotten.

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The first is from Elon Musk, about the “big beautiful” tax bill before Congress:

The phrase which caught the eye was “disgusting abomination”.

You see, abominations are inherently disgusting.

Either the bill is “disgusting” or it is an “abomination”, but there is no need to say both.

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The second is also from Elon Musk:

The key phrase here is “entire corpus of”.

Either “entirety of” or “corpus of” would have done, but again there is no need to say both.

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The third is from Donald Trump:

“Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”

Here saying “obliterated” would have been enough.

Saying “completely” - though intended to intensify only weakened the impact of “obliterated”.

Adding “totally” as a further intensifier weakened it yet further.

There was no need to say all three words.

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All of these examples show a lack of attention to what words mean.

Each example is by itself unexceptional, almost trivial. We all make mistakes, etc - and this blog is not perfect, etc.

But taken together, with scores of other similar examples from Trump, Musk and other senior figures in the United States administration, it shows a casual relationship between words and the things those words describe.

Words are just for effect.

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Trump emphasising “completely and totally” indeed suggested a lack of confidence that the facilities had indeed been “obliterated”.

A lack of confidence which accorded with later news reports:

Trump did not take this correction well and so, despite his ‘free speech’ postures, he called for the journalist to be sacked:

(Note the “like a dog”.)

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One purpose of this blog is to send postcards from the here-and-now, so that there is documentation of how things seemed at the time.

And at this time, many politicians use words - like a real-life version of Artificial Intelligence slop - with little or no correspondence to meaning.

Perhaps politicians have always done this - and no doubt one or two will want to reply to this post saying so.

But it has now got to the stage where one can instantly dismiss what is being said because the politician is saying too much.

Had Trump said the facilities had been obliterated, it may have perhaps seemed credible.

But the addition of both intensifiers immediately discredited the proposition.

And so any useful meaning was, well, obliterated.