this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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This concerns me more than the rest. It's like Nostradamus: it invites one to draw conclusions from complete nonsense. And like the literary equivalent of a Rorschach test, the reader inevitably sees a piece of themself reflected on the page, and the experience is distinct yet repeatable by everybody.
That's a problem even with proper English with good grammar. There's a certain bias in the assumptions of the speaker and listener, which contributes to misunderstandings which are easily observed in almost every human interaction. The ambiguity of language is hard to avoid. The fact is that the speaker makes many unconscious assumptions about the listener understanding the context under which they are making their statements, and the listener must make assumptions on the context under which the speaker is making their statements.
The trouble is that, unless you're incredibly verbose, the likelihood that every reader/listener has the same context in mind as the speaker, is incredibly small. We as humans have a natural set of assumptions for the context of any given statement; those assumptions are not necessarily the same from person to person, state to state, country to country, and regional geography to regional geography.
This isn't to mention the nuance of idioms and cultural references that are invoked in many conversations, to which, if you don't understand the underlying story/contexts in which that idiom or reference exists, misunderstandings are inevitable.
With all that being said, I find that most people at least put in adequate effort to ensure their thoughts are portrayed in a comprehensible way. Most of the misunderstandings which result from that effort are detailed above (as far as I've seen). What Trump is saying, however, shows no effort to explain our even make mention of what context this string of words should be taken under, and the only concepts I can derive from his incomprehensible word vomit are so generalized that it has left the majority of the message to whatever context you wish to install for it.
Depending on what context you choose to use for it, this string of words could be a powerful call to arms, or it could be the nonsensical drivel of a madman. I fall more into the latter category, since I have worked hard to remove as much assumption and personal bias from my active listening, and thus, in the absence of any indicators of context from the speaker, the statement does not make any sense at all.