Award-winning educator Nancie Atwell is well known (among those who know her) for her exemplary middle school writing workshop curriculum, Lessons That Change Writers. For the brief period of time that I had the good fortune to teach middle school language arts, I used this curriculum with my students, and much of the work they produced was knock-me-over-with-a-feather amazing. (I can recall one student who, over the course of the year, wrote almost exclusively about fishing or fish—and who, upon being introduced to the work of Pablo Neruda, penned an “Ode to the Bluegill” that straight-up channeled the guy’s spirit.)
One of the lessons in Lessons That Change Writers is called “The Really Bad Words.” No, it’s got nothing to do with profanity. Rather, it’s about commonly used intensifiers, such as “really,” that have the effect of weakening rather than strengthening one’s message. These words include:
- absolutely
- all
- (a) big
- completely
- definitely
- just
- kind of
- (a) little
- quite
- really
- so
- sort of
- totally
- very
- would (as in, “We would jump in the water” as opposed to “We jumped in the water” or “We used to jump in the water”)
Tonight, as my wife and I were in the car, NPR played a snippet of speech from Donald Trump. My wife lunged for the button to turn the radio off, but Trump got a couple of sentences out before she could. And what’s either hilariously or irritatingly striking (depending on your point of view) about the way Donald Trump speaks is that he uses these “really bad words” compulsively. Sometimes it seems like they account for three-fourths of the words he uses. It may be his single most noticeable—and easily parodied—verbal tic.
I mentioned this lesson, and the fact that Trump obviously never learned it, to my wife. Her response was immediate and definitive: “That’s because everything he says is bullshit. Those are words bullshitters use to cover up their bullshit.”
That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that the man has the mind of a middle-schooler who hasn’t yet learned that there are things the teacher knows and he doesn’t. And another is that, like many people with grandiose personalities, he doesn’t realize that talking big, when one’s ideas are small, can communicate weakness rather than strength. The words may be vague, but what they tell us is unmistakably clear.
He just so totally has absolutely nothing to say that’s really worth saying.