Trump’s empty adjectives mean we should be very, very worried

Occasionally, Trump loses the run of himself and allows his paired adverbs to breed like rabbits, writes Terry Prone.

If I knew where Mick is buried, I’d go visit his grave one of these days, just to check if that phrase about someone turning in their grave could be true.

Mick was a greatly feared sub-editor in his fifties when I was a 16-year old feature writer on his newspaper. A legend in his own lunchtime, he was, mainly known for wrecking phones by banging them down on illiterate freelance reporters when they couldn’t see the grammatical light.

To be called up to the section of the newsroom wherein he lived in cigarette-strewn chaos but syntactical order was to have your heart clench, your blood run frigidly, and your hands develop a pronounced tremor. The day I was summoned, everybody in the features department rallied round in support. Since nobody, including me, knew what I’d done wrong, the support was necessarily conditional, ergo useless. Eventually, one of the group told me that at least he couldn’t fire me. Realising that this did not fill me with confidence, they gave me a list of the people who could fire me, which was even less encouraging.

From bitter personal experience, they passed on life-saving tips. They told me not to argue with him, no matter how convinced I was that I was in the right. They reminded me that he hated adjectives with a great passion and the historic past tense with an even greater passion. They told me they’d take me out for a drink afterwards. Go on, they said, pretending they were helping me to get through an unpleasant task quickly, whereas I knew they just wanted me to make a speedy tear-stained return, ready to do some projectile sobbing while I told them what he had said to me.

I had already annoyed this man by putting the word ‘faggotting’ in the title line of a piece about embroidery. This meant that although I filed the copy on time, he couldn’t use it because he didn’t think a fashion correspondent’s piece could legitimately use that word. Just what kind of piece wherein he expected the word to figure wasn’t clear.

So, on this second occasion, I pitched up beside him, wondering if a two-strikes-and-you’re-out rule applied. Siddon, he said. I sat. He produced hard copy of my latest piece, decorated with a soft crayon. One word was repeatedly ringed throughout the text. He flailed it at me and I said I was sorry. What, he demanded, was I sorry for? That word, I said. What word, he asked? The one you’ve marked, I said, unable to tell him that the page had been moving so quickly, I couldn’t decipher which was the serial offender.

He drew as deep a breath as a man with severe tobacco-induced emphysema could draw, and let it out slowly through pursed lips. Then he advanced the page towards me and picked up the spike. The spike was a tall bit of metal embedded in a heavy stand, the business end sharpened for the impaling of rejected copy. I thought he was going to stab me with it, but he used it, presumably because he couldn’t find his pen amid the cigarette butts, to point at a word in my feature. The word was ‘unique’. He demanded a definition, which I falteringly gave. (I had defined ‘faggotting’ with much more aplomb, for all the good it had done me.)

“Right. So if something is unique, it’s out on its own, correct? Why, then, would you mind telling me, have you put the word ‘very’ in front of it?”

“For emphasis?” I ventured.

He explained that absolutes cannot be emphasised. I nodded in frantic agreement, realising as I did that the ringed word throughout the feature was ‘very’. He put the spike down and quietly made me promise I would never again use that word. It was an intensifier that weakened, he told me. I was about to tell him I was very sorry and would be very careful in future, but I was mercifully speechless.

I had forgotten that experience until Donald Trump took over the US presidency. It flooded back as he said his ban on immigrants from a bunch of Muslim countries was going very, very well. This was at a public event after the ban had face-planted spectacularly. Never mind the reality, feel the assertion. Or, as happened last week, never mind the reality, feel the external blame, when it comes to Michael T Flynn the Trump choice to lead the National Security Agency. Michael T, who reached three-star general status in the army, God knows how, misled vice-president Mike Pence and an assortment of other officials about grossly inappropriate little chats Michael T had, in the recent past, with a Russian diplomat. Today, one week ago, Mr Trump canned Michael T, a month after he had appointed him.

Now, you might think that a man with a big complicated job would not want to keep drawing attention to this unfortunate incident. You might further think that a man whose main claim to fame is his capacity to point a stubby forefinger at a competitor in a reality TV show and say “You’re fired!” would be able to do the same in real life and move on. Were you to think along those lines, you would be so wrong. Two days later, on Wednesday, the president went back to pick his scab and exculpate himself by saying that Mr Flynn had “been treated very, very unfairly by the media”. Everything with Trump is very, very. In the scheme of things, this may not seem that important, but trust me, once you notice it, it will have the same effect on you as my singular use of the word had on my long-dead sub-editor.

At first glance, and to be fair to the man for no good reason, this repetition might seem to be the product of pressured sound-bites edited for TV news, but dig a little deeper and it emerges that his written communication follows the same pattern. In his tweets, things are “very, very unfair”, “very, very disrespectful”, “very, very dumb”, or, most frequently and most promiscuously, “very, very sad”.

Occasionally, he loses the run of himself completely, and allows his paired adverbs (or adjectives, depending on the context) to breed like rabbits. A classic example of this is a tweet from 2012, where he said, perhaps in relation to his theory that his predecessor was born somewhere foreign: “Barack Obama’s college application would be very very very very interesting!”

Mick, my old sub-editor, would undoubtedly turn in his grave over such ungoverned use of this hated word. He’d be positively revolving in it over the use of exclamation marks. But his fury would go deeper. He would view such tawdry use of language, not as a simple vivid way of reaching the disenfranchised, but as a significant indicator of a shoddy, unprincipled approach to one of the most important roles in world politics.