It’s odd—a friend messaged me after reading to say he did the same thing, yet Dickinson analysts are either mystified or in denial that the caps mean anything at all; and the only articles I could find on Trump’s casing found it very odd indeed and were similarly mystified (though they were low-effort output articles at major news organizations, not analysis). So I am hearing only that it’s super weird or that it’s quite typical, nothing in-between!
I don’t really expect academic analysts or journalists to be on top of noticing “heretical grammar” in common usage,[1] and I suspect that the articles about Trump’s usage are intended as dunks on him.
I bet if you pay attention you’ll see it fairly regularly! (In posts, comments, and blogs… probably not so much in things like Wikipedia or the NYT.)
Geoff Lindsey has lots of videos about academic blindspots like this in phonology (but to be fair, he is an academic himself). The pattern seems to be that the received wisdom gets ossified, and then people in the field don’t even notice that they need to update. I suspect this is pretty common in any domain where there are epistemic authorities people prefer to defer to.
It’s odd—a friend messaged me after reading to say he did the same thing, yet Dickinson analysts are either mystified or in denial that the caps mean anything at all; and the only articles I could find on Trump’s casing found it very odd indeed and were similarly mystified (though they were low-effort output articles at major news organizations, not analysis). So I am hearing only that it’s super weird or that it’s quite typical, nothing in-between!
I don’t really expect academic analysts or journalists to be on top of noticing “heretical grammar” in common usage,[1] and I suspect that the articles about Trump’s usage are intended as dunks on him.
I bet if you pay attention you’ll see it fairly regularly! (In posts, comments, and blogs… probably not so much in things like Wikipedia or the NYT.)
Geoff Lindsey has lots of videos about academic blindspots like this in phonology (but to be fair, he is an academic himself). The pattern seems to be that the received wisdom gets ossified, and then people in the field don’t even notice that they need to update. I suspect this is pretty common in any domain where there are epistemic authorities people prefer to defer to.