I believe that in Trump’s linguistic mind (and make no mistake, he is one of the most interesting linguistic minds of our day, and I’ve thought this for ten years now, even back when I was voting for his opponents), there are nouns, proper nouns, and Important Nouns. How to give emphasis to this new class of Important Nouns? In speech it’s easy, and you hear it in his voice when he speaks, this emphasis (or anyone’s voice, emphasizing the important nouns in a sentence is a very common element of speech); but in writing it’s not clear how to do it.
This capitalization of “Important Nouns” thing isn’t particularly unique to Trump. I’ve used it for a long time in my own writing, I recall it being A Thing in 2015-era Tumblr, and Eliezer uses it quite a bit in the sequences too (Ex. last paragraph of The Bottom Line). It seems pretty widespread to me honestly.
I think “Important Nouns” is not quite the right description, and that its use (in all these cases) is more about something like invoking a more specific concept than the nouns would normally imply. And yeah, I think this is a standard part of spoken English which people intuitively write by capitalizing like this.
I associate the Important Nouns with the Winne-the-Pooh stories, where they are used for a certain humorous effect.
Christopher Robin was sitting outside his door, putting on his Big Boots. As soon as he saw the Big Boots, Pooh knew that an Adventure was going to happen, and he brushed the honey off his nose with the back of his paw, and spruced himself up as well as he could, so as to look Ready for Anything.
It does suggest something like a specific concept, a recognized pattern; while also suggesting perhaps a pompousness and self-importance.
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.
This capitalization of “Important Nouns” thing isn’t particularly unique to Trump. I’ve used it for a long time in my own writing, I recall it being A Thing in 2015-era Tumblr, and Eliezer uses it quite a bit in the sequences too (Ex. last paragraph of The Bottom Line). It seems pretty widespread to me honestly.
I think “Important Nouns” is not quite the right description, and that its use (in all these cases) is more about something like invoking a more specific concept than the nouns would normally imply. And yeah, I think this is a standard part of spoken English which people intuitively write by capitalizing like this.
I associate the Important Nouns with the Winne-the-Pooh stories, where they are used for a certain humorous effect.
It does suggest something like a specific concept, a recognized pattern; while also suggesting perhaps a pompousness and self-importance.
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.