Spectrum
Money trumps all in Donald'slanguage
Ruth Wajnryb
575 words
14 May 2005
The Sydney Morning Herald
First
22
English
© 2005 Copyright John Fairfax Holdings Limited.
www.smh.com.au Not available for re-distribution.
WORDS
Some perversities are peculiarly American. Since 1976, Lake Superior State University in Florida has been issuing an annual list of words deemed unworthy of inclusion in the language. Their crime? "Mis-use, over-use and general uselessness." Top of the latest is "You're fired!", the weekly ejaculatory climax of The Apprentice. Meanwhile, Donald Trump and one of his fired apprentice wannabes are in a legal tussle about who owns the "You're fired!" trademark.
Proving that all publicity is good publicity, nothing seems to dent the ongoing popularity of Trump's reality TV series. Now well beyond its debut season, the show has developed its own discourse style - its Trumpese, if you like - that emanates centrifugally from the Donald.
In a sense, the contestant most likely to succeed is the one best able to slip into a comfortable relationship with Trumpese. If you speak the language, you're in tune with the culture and in harmony with the ethos and pragmatics of the Trump empire.
Trumpese has three key components. The first is the celebration of capitalism. This show makes money out of watching people make money. The theme song says it all: "Money money money m-o-n-e-y it's not personal, it's only business." Money is the single measurement of worth, the only arbiter of success.
A second feature of Trumpese is its asymmetrical power relations. Unequal discourse is characterised by non-reciprocal rights. The most apparent is terms of address. Everyone, bar Mr Trump, is called by their first name - the sycophantic contestants, the employees and hangers-on, the right-hand people. To his face, Trump is "Mr Trump".
Another demonstration of non-reciprocal rights is in the allocation of conversational turns. In the penultimate boardroom scene, where the losing team is held to account, questions are one-way - a frenzied carpet-bomb attack from Trump, who badgers, corners, then swoops in for the kill. The contestants try to respond but are obsessively interrupted by Trump, who demands answers but disables them mid-stream, creates defensiveness and then penalises it, dangles rhetorical questions in the air above the table until he answers them himself.
The third element of the discourse is conceit. You can call it confidence if you like but such blatant trumpet-blowing is more properly termed conceit. None of the apprentice wannabes lacks a healthy ego. They're forever breaking the modesty principle - a tacit rule in the language that discourages boasting and encourages a public (even if disingenuous) face of humility.
And where there's pumped-up ego and competition, collision is inevitable. Individuals jostle for power, establish unholy alliances, throw tantrums and are fuelled by their win/lose ethos.
The presence of ego is apparent in the movement of pronouns. Normally, as the team starts out, they're thinking in terms of "we" and "our". Within a very short time, the cracks begin to appear; as the various egos percolate up and over into collision, the "we" turns to "I" and the "our" to "my". By the time of the final boardroom confrontations, the accusatory "you" and the finger pointing "he" and "she" are everywhere to be heard. Enter the language of blame.
Still, all that money and all that power could not a decent hairstyle buy. Even in America.
