My observation is that it seems to be thinking of language as a way to convey meaning vs. thinking of language as a way to accomplish goals. Talking to toddlers and young school children, I recognize that they are largely using language like it’s a mysterious control panel: I say X and thing Y happens. Two-year-olds, in my experience, often say “Yes” when they are happy and “No” when they are angry. Over time they refine that use of language to better get what they want.
But to get advanced education at some point you have to switch over from the say X to effect Y model - the goal of speaking is to agree on ideas, not to create a social effect. This is necessary for Book Learnin’ so you see it more in more educated people (I’ve said this somewhere else recently, but there’s no sequence of utterances that will make you know calculus, for example, I need to be able to explain the ideas).
Trump clearly communicates to accomplish ends. This is why I think people largely misunderstand him. When Trump says that the inauguration crowd was the biggest or the election win was the biggest, Trump’s attempting to get people to think they’re great, not actually conveying any meaning. Spicer all but confirmed this when talking about the quotation marks around “wires tapped”. Trump was attempting to generate an effect - get people on team Trump - not to tell us anything about what actually happened.
But Trump thinks everyone else is doing the same. So when the media reports that there is no evidence Trump’s phone was tapped, they hear that the media is negating the statement. Since Trump’s statement was an action directed at getting people on their team, the media’s negation of it is read as a reaction trying to get people to leave their team.
I don’t know or care if that is true. I do know that it makes sense of what Trump says and predicts how Trump will react to things.
This conveying ideas vs. creating outcomes may be a spectrum, or maybe it’s better to view it as two orthogonal axes so that a statement could do both or neither. Either way, I think this is the source of the idea of “elites”. It’s people who use language to convey ideas. That doesn’t sound like a negative trait, but I think that people who use language in this way are as quick to demean people who don’t as Trump is to filter media reports through a personal lens.
I brought this up before in a thread whether there was a study that Trump supporters could be shown pictures of the Trump and the Obama crowd. They were asked which was which, and then asked which was larger. A “surprisingly” high number of Trump supporters correctly identified which picture was of his crowd but then bizarrely insisted it was larger. So people thought this showed their ideology was overwhelming their ability to see what was in front of them.
My interpretation is that they took the second question, “Which picture has more people in it” not in the way I’d take a psychological study (I know they will ask dumb questions and they just want me to answer honestly and record whatever response they get), but in the way you’d take that question from some asshole trying to rub it in your face that their guy won. Like if your friend came over and said, “Here’s the numbers 28 and 21, which one was the score your team got in the big game,” you’d know the answer was 21. If they followed it up with, “Which number is higher?” I can’t think of any way to take the question other than them being an asshole. Insisting 21 is higher seems like a totally reasonable response - it’s a linguistic middle finger, not a way of conveying information. The think the purpose of the study is to make fun of them.
If that wasn’t the purpose of the study, it was the effect of the study. The study had people making fun of Trump supporters for being stupid, willfully blind, etc. So sometimes I feel like we shame people for having had few educational opportunities the same way that Republicans shame people for having few employment opportunities.
(This is totally different than shaming people for being racist, which I approve of)
Anyway, I hope @Nightic responds to share what they think of as “elite”. I don’t like my odds since there’s a good chance I’ll be read as a jerk looking for ammo, though.
Yeah, you’d think a president 50 days into their term could say, “Oh, wow, tucker, I haven’t read much of anything other than briefings since I started this job. I have some books I’d like to get to, but right now I just can’t find the time.” and people would be like, “Yeah, that’s fair.” Even though it would be kind of obvious bullshit it certainly wouldn’t get them any more flak than this response. It’s just another example of Trump lying about something they could have just as easily told the truth about.
