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THE NORTH AMERICAN JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN LINGUISTICS & LITERATURE VOL 3 NO 1 (2020)
1
“Mr. Malaprop”: The President Donald Trump on Twitter with his Malapropic
Vocabulary.
Sajid Chaudhry
1
Received: 05/30/2020 | Accepted: 06/25/2020 | Published: 07/12/2020
Abstract
The study analyzed tweets of the President Donald Trump to observe the presence of Malapropism. For
the purpose, five hundred tweets appearing online from the President’s personal twitter handle
“@realDonaldTrump” were randomly selected. Content analysis of the selected data units revealed that
the Presidential tweets are generally syntactic flubs and are frequently stuffed with semantic mistakes.
Findings of the study suggest that the President occasionally gets tricked by the orthographic and
phonetic adjacency of the words and substitutes the contextually needed words with Malaprops.
Keywords: Twitter; Malapropism; Social media; Syntax; Phonetic similarities; Semantics
Introduction
Words are the fundamental ingredient for any kind of communiqué and their selection matters.
Naturally, writing is no exception to this principle. In written communications, right words
form meaningful sentences, which then generate conclusive paragraphs, and the wheel keeps
moving. This is how a written piece of language establishes its formality and authenticates the
effectiveness and acceptability level of communication. If the composed language is
standardized, loaded with apposite words, communicative intent of the writer achieves its
target. On the other hand, if the text is marked with errors and is anomalous, the result will be a
topsy-turvy communication. Simply, this means that inappropriate words, following one
another in a sequence without proper syntax, might give an aerial look of a sentence but they
will not serve the purpose of a communication, that is, not just to pass on the information but to
provide the understandable information. Inappropriateness of words not only hinder the
determination of their meaning that stems from the conventional understanding, semantically
associated to them, but also mangle the overall pragmatics of the text, they are placed in. This
kind of discordancy falls in line with what the linguists consider as a semantic misalignment
1Sajid Chaudhry PhD.
North American Academic Syndicate, Canada | e-mail: consultant@naascanada.org
Hosted & Published By
North American Academic Syndicate
www.naascanada.org | info@naascanada.org
THE NORTH AMERICAN JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN LINGUISTICS & LITERATURE VOL 3 NO 1 (2020)
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that, in addition to the confused reception of message, undermines the expressive competency of
the writer. There might be many other whys and wherefores behind semantic misalignments in a
written discourse, but presumably most often phonetic and orthographic similarities of words
put writers in such clumsy situations where pedants get chances to grate their teeth. Rubin
2
(2019), in one of his online articles, refers to this propensity of word muddling as an awkward
fusion of two similar sounding words and links it to ‘Malapropism’
3
. Malapropism is defined by
the Oxford English Dictionary
4
as “the ludicrous misuse of words, especially in mistaking a
word for another resembling it”. Congruently, the Encyclopaedia Britannica
5
has also recorded
Malapropism as a “blunder in which one word is replaced by another, similar in sound but
different in meaning”. It is assumed that Malaprops appear in written discourses when the
cognitive and articulatory mechanisms of the writers do not go hand in hand.
The Twitter Context
Twitter
6
, as a microblogging platform, is in frequent use these days. Around 330 Million people,
around the globe, use twitter actively and produce approximately 500 Million postings
everyday
7
. Twitter postings, named as tweets, are considered reader-focused, adequately
thought and developed pieces of writing. Language choices, the twitter users make, help them
develop or change their followers’ perspective about them but it all depends on how their tweets
are perceived and understood by their fellow twitter users. President Donald J. Trump
8
, with 77
Million current followers, has been on twitter since March 2009
9
and his personal Twitter
2
Rubin, A. R. (2019) In Praise of Malapropaganda. Available at: https://www.thedailybeast.com/in-
praise-of-malapropaganda.
3
The term Malapropism owes its allegiance to the French expression mal à propos and is in use since
1814. It is derived from Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play “The Rivals” (1775) in which a character named
as Mrs. Malaprop frequently misuses words in a way that one word gets replaced with another, similar in
sound but altogether unrelated in meaning. Malapropism is also known as Dogberryism, after the
character of Constable Dogberry in William Shakespeare's “Much Ado About Nothing”.
4
Oxford English Dictionary 3rd ed. (2000). http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/112760?redirectedFrom=
malapropism#eid.
5
Encyclopaedia Britannica (2007) https://www.britannica.com/topic/malapropism
6
Twitter, an online microblogging social media platform, emerged in 2006 and very rapidly got
worldwide acceptance for sharing short text messages with other handlers using personal computational
devices.
7
The statistics are retrieved, on the 14th of April 2020, from https://business.twitter.com/ &
https://www.statista.com/ statistics/282087/number-of-monthly-active-twitter-users/
8
The 45th President of the United States of America.
9
Figures are retrieved on the 14th of April 2020 from https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump
THE NORTH AMERICAN JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN LINGUISTICS & LITERATURE VOL 3 NO 1 (2020)
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handle “@realDonaldTrump” is ranked among the 10 most followed twitter accounts
10
.
Anderson
11
(2017) mentions that the President Trump considers “twitter as a powerful thing”
and has been tweeting actively since, well before, his presidential candidacy in 2016, also during
his presidential campaign and after being sworn in as the President on the 20th of January 2017.
Though the President Trump is an author of several best-selling books
12
, yet his twitter posts are
always in discussion due to their dubious linguistic properties. Garner
13
(2019) puts a serious
question mark on the writing style of the President Trump. Garner observes
14
that “the
President Trump’s continual flouting of even basic rules of spelling, grammar, punctuation and
diction is a serious matter”. Similar is Sokolowski’s
15
(2019) viewpoint
16
about the semantic
errors of the President Trump’s writings. Divergently, the President Trump openly criticizes his
philological opponents and has his own version on his writing style. In a tweet, the President
Trump writes
17
that “After having written many best-selling books, and somewhat priding
myself on my ability to write, it should be noted that the Fake News constantly likes to pore
over my tweets looking for a mistake”.
Considering the President Trump’s writing style debateable, the current study aims at analyzing
his tweets, qualitatively, to observe the presence of Malapropism in them. The President
Trump’s tweets might, or might not, appear laced with other grammatical errors too but staying
within the jurisdiction of its investigational domain, exploration for the Malapropism, the study
will show evasiveness to those probable grammatical mistakes. The reason behind not doing
grammar policing gyrates around the recognition of nonstandard characteristics of the social
10
Information retrieved on the 14th of April 2020 from https://www.statista.com/statistics/273172/
twitter-accounts-with-the-most-followers-worldwide/
11
Anderson, B. (2017). Tweeter-in-chief: a content analysis of president Trump’s tweeting habits. Elon
Journal of Undergraduate Research in Communications, 8(2), 36-47.
12
The source of this information is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Books_by_Donald_Trump
13
Bryan Andrew Garner is a renowned American author, lexicographer, and teacher from Dallas, United
States. He is the author of “Garner’s Modern English Usage,” and more than two dozen other books about the
usage and style of English language.
14
In an interview with Cooper Neill of The New York Times. The observation is mentioned in an online
article https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/31/us/politics/trump-twitter.html
15
Peter Sokolowski is an author, a lexicographer and the editor-at-large at Merriam-Webster.
16
Abstracted from “Trump’s Twitter War on Spelling”, an article written by Sarah Lyall for The New
York Times. The article is available at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/31/us/politics/trump-twitter.
Html
17
Donald Trump’s tweet on the 3rd of July 2018. The actual post can be viewed at https://twitter.com/
realdonaldtrump/status/1014286054805987330?lang=en
THE NORTH AMERICAN JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN LINGUISTICS & LITERATURE VOL 3 NO 1 (2020)
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media language by several researchers. For example, Zappavigna
18
(2012) and Boland and
Queen
19
(2016) believe that the advent of social media platforms have changed the linguistic
conventions of online writing with various stylistic variations. Particularly tweets, remarks
Puniyani et al.
20
(2010), are a form of length-delimited communication, with non-standard
orthography, where meanings are conveyed in a constrained environment. Similarly, Zappavigna
(2012) also believes that brevity has not only changed the structural configurations of these
microblogs but also has influenced the pragmatics of their messages. Correspondingly, the
researcher believes that the President Trump does deserve a benefit of doubt, in case his tweets
come under the umbrella of these changed stylistic variations. But, compared to the grammatical
and structural odds, the issue of Malapropism is different. Malaprops are a little harder to
overlook. Malaprops are not merely a by-product of misspells, they are reflections of the
linguistic competence of writers. Simply stated, cilantro leaves and parsley leaves, Ginger roots
and turmeric roots might give a similar look, but they extend totally different tastes. Same is the
case with Malaprops. Malaprops might look-alike or sound-alike but they come with dissimilar
meanings.
Literature Review
The New York Times observes in an article
21
that “when Mr. Trump entered office, twitter was a
political tool that had helped get him elected and a digital howitzer that he relished firing. In the
years since, he has fully integrated twitter into the very fabric of his administration, reshaping
the nature of the presidency and presidential power”. Several researchers think along the same
lines. In 2017 Anderson
22
researched tweeting habits of the President Trump and conducted a
content analysis of his tweets. From this study of Anderson, it appears that the broad trust
deficit between the President and the Journalistic media is a prime reason behind the excessive
18
Zappavigna, M. (2012). Discourse of Twitter and social media. Continuum International Publishing
Group, London / New York.
19
Boland, J. E., & Queen, R. (2016). If you’re house is still available, send me an email: Personality
influences reactions to written errors in email messages. PloS one, 11(3).
20
Puniyani, K., Eisenstein, J., Cohen, S., & Xing, E. P. (2010, June). Social links from latent topics in
microblogs. In Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Computational Linguistics in a
World of Social Media (pp. 19-20). Association for Computational Linguistics.
21
“How Trump Reshaped the Presidency in Over 11,000 Tweets”. Published on November 02, 2019 and is
available at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/02/us/politics/trump-twitter-presidency.html.
Authors of the article are By Michael D. Shear, Maggie Haberman, Nicholas Confessore, Karen Yourish,
Larry Buchanan and Keith Collins.
22
Anderson, B. (2017). Tweeter-in-chief: a content analysis of president Trump’s tweeting habits. Elon
Journal of Undergraduate Research in Communications, 8(2), 36-47.
THE NORTH AMERICAN JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN LINGUISTICS & LITERATURE VOL 3 NO 1 (2020)
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use of twitter by him. Anderson noted that twitter helps the President reach out to his
supporters directly, bypassing the conventional press. Designating this microblogging platform
as “Tweeter-in-Chief” to the President, Anderson also differentiated between the tones of
tweets, appearing on the timelines of two distinct twitter handles, used by the president;
@realDonaldTrump (personal) and @POTUS (official). Anderson observed that the tweets
attributed to the President’s personal handle, @realDonaldTrump, contain angrier and
inflammatory language as compared to the tweets coming online from the official account,
handled by his staff. Policy statements, personal attacks on opponents, self-praise, media
criticism are the main subject-matter of the President’s tweets, concludes Anderson.
In 2018 Pavek
23
studied the President Trump’s twitter usage and his twitter popularity. Pavek
observed that the significance of his twitter influence is linked to the powerful office he holds.
Twitter helps him set and promote his political viewpoint, unfiltered by critics and other media
outlets. The phrase, “tweets from the Bully Pulpit” used by Pavek, goes back to the era of the
President Roosevelt,
24
who used to call his office “bully pulpit”, a tremendous platform to
promote his agenda. Regarding twitter’s impact on his political approvals, Pavek believed that
the President doesn’t appear to be negatively hurt by his controversial twitter habits. Joseph et
al.
25
(2019) investigated the partisanship and polarization that emerge in response to the
Presidential tweets. The researchers found that his tweets, though play a central role in
America’s political news cycle, yet they receive highly polarized responses. And, these caustic
responses are not just limited to his political opponents, the Democrats. The Republicans, his
own party affiliates, also agree with Democrats on the relatively better and worse linguistic
qualities of his tweets. Joseph et al. termed this, across the party lines, veiled unanimity of
responses on the Presidential tweets, quite an amazing unseen agreement.
23
Pavek, J. (2018). Tweets from the Bully Pulpit: President Trump’s Twitter habits and his Popularity.
https://www.bemidjistate.edu/academics/departments/political-science/wp-content/uploads/sites
/40/2018/09/pavek-thesis.pdf
24
Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945.
25
Joseph, K., Swire-Thompson, B., Masuga, H., Baum, M. A., & Lazer, D. (2019, July). Polarized, Together:
Comparing Partisan Support for Trump’s Tweets Using Survey and Platform-Based Measures. In
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (Vol. 13, No. 01, pp. 290-
301).
THE NORTH AMERICAN JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN LINGUISTICS & LITERATURE VOL 3 NO 1 (2020)
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Pérez-Curiel and Limón Naharro
26
(2018) analyzed influence of the President Donald Trump’s
tweets, from his personal twitter handle “@realDonaldTrump” during his candidacy and
presidency period, on Social Networking Sites (SNS) and on the newspapers like USA Today, The
Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. The findings of their research
authenticated that, irrespective of the viewpoint differences, Donald Trump’s tweets have
influenced and are still influencing opinion of the SNS users and content of the newspapers. The
newspapers, analyzed by the researchers, frequently replicate the discourse model of the
President, his brand image and the tweets largely liked, retweeted, shared, and commented by
his twitter followers. In 2019, Campbell
27
investigated the Presidential tweets of the 2018, in
order to observe the President’s concerns on the issues, most relevant to the people of America
in that year. Campbell came up with the conclusion, after analysis of the Presidential tweets of
2018, that the American people and the President Trump were not on the same page regarding
the issues of mass shootings, economy, immigration and trade. Though, the President tweeted
on all the issues, but his perspective was not, what the people expected from their President.
Campbell noted that the President’s thrust mainly remained in defending himself against the
Muller probe
28
and in criticizing those who were, directly or indirectly, involved in this probe,
looking into the Russian connections with the Presidential campaign of Donald Trump.
Flores, Falk and Stoves
29
(2019) conducted a content analysis on the President Donald Trump’s
tweets from his first 100 days in White House. These researchers found that the President uses
twitter, not merely for communicational purposes, but also to prompt responses from the fellow
twitter users. Rhetorically, Flores, Falk and Stoves believe, Trump’s tweets fall in lines with the
rhetorical fundamentals outlined by Burke
30
(1950). Burke suggested that in order to persuade
others, one needs to talk the language, they speak following their way of speech, gesture,
tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, etc. The President tweets, exactly, what his supporters
26
Pérez-Curiel, C., & Limón-Naharro, P. (2019). Political influencers. A study of Donald Trump’s
personal brand on Twitter and its impact on the media and users.
27
Campbell, Y. D. (2019). On the Same Page? A Content Analysis of President Trump’s 2018 Tweets
Regarding Issues Most Relevant to the American People. Online Journal of Communication and Media
Technologies, 9(4), e201923.
28
Information about the Muller probe is available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Counsel_
investigation_(2017%E2%80%932019)
29
Flores, P. L., Falk, L. K., & Stoves, D. (2019). Trumps Social Media –The First 100 Days of his
Presidency: A Content Analysis. QRBD, 303.
30
Burke, K. (1950). A rhetoric of motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
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want to hear in a simple, non-elite language, a language that is unconventional, unguarded and is
full of spontaneity. In 2019, Clarke and Grieve
31
did a linguistic analysis of the Presidential
tweets to find out stylistic variations during the years between 2009 and 2018. Quantitative and
qualitative analysis of the selected data led Clarke and Grieve towards the identification of four-
dimensional stylistic variations namely, conversational, campaigning, engaging and advisory.
Clarke and Grieve observed that communicational style of the Presidential tweets kept changing
depending upon his intended audience and communicative goals. The language of his tweets
appeared as informal and conversational the time he was trying to establish his connections
with the Republican supporters and with like-minded people. The tweets looked formal and
informationally loaded when his audience were general public. But, the language of his tweets
becomes direct and unapologetic when the communicational goal is self-promotion, self-defence
or when he is criticizing his opponents.
Overview of the Literature Reviewed
The reviewed studies are meant to provide a gist of the previously available understanding of
twitter usage by the President Donald Trump. It is germane to mention here that the
researcher’s quest to find out previously conducted academic works, particularly, on Malapropism
in the President’s tweets yielded no article. But even though the reviewed studies do not
correspond to the study’s central subject-matter Malapropism in totality, their relevance still
exists as all of them converge on general characteristics of the language used by the President in
his tweets. This convergence, the researcher believes, provides genesis to the current study as
Malapropism, after all, is the product of a faulty linguistic Know-how. Henceforth, the researcher
perceives that the current study will not only fill the existing lacuna, the non-existence of
academic works on the subject-matter of this study, Malapropism, but will also be a valuable
addition to the existing literature on the President Donald Trump’s linguistic mastery.
Hypothesis
The following hypotheses are developed to cover the study’s investigational domain.
31
Clarke, I., & Grieve, J. (2019). Stylistic variation on the Donald Trump Twitter account: A linguistic
analysis of tweets posted between 2009 and 2018. PloS one, 14(9).
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Null Hypothesis: The President Donald Trump believes in his writing ability and accuses that
his adversaries faultily attribute mistakes to his tweets. The current study adopts this claim
32
of
the President as its null hypothesis.
Alternative Hypothesis: The writing ability of the President Donald Trump is not immune to
linguistic mistakes. The phraseology of his tweets, recurrently, reflects noticeable semantic
errors. This observation will serve as the alternative hypothesis of the current study.
Data and Data Collection
Five hundred (500) tweets that appeared on the President’s Twitter timeline using the personal
handle @realDonaldTrump were arbitrarily selected, based on the ease of access, from the
following online sources: Twitter
33
, Twitonomy
34
and ProPublica
35
. Twitter is the official
microblogging website. Twitonomy is a web-based source that provides twitter related analytics
on anyone's tweets. ProPublica contains a complete archive of the deleted tweets of the President
Donald Trump. It is quite apt to mention here that the research is delimited to the mentioned
twitter handle and to the mentioned data collection sources only. Furthermore, there exists a
possibility that the researcher might have skipped some tweets of particular dates, months or
years.
Methodology
Descriptive and qualitative in nature, the current study used Content Analysis as the
investigative method to harvest the Malaprops from the textual contents of the selected data
units. To reach the authentic deductions, the analysis involved judgement based on the cognitive
competence and the appropriate linguistic knowledge. Multiple readings and close contextual
observations, of the selected tweets, helped the researcher uncover or understand the secrecies
of meanings attached to the identified Malaprops and to the possibly required words. As
mentioned in the introductory part of the study, the precise area of investigation remained the
32
“After having written many best-selling books, and somewhat priding myself on my ability to write, it
should be noted that the Fake News constantly likes to pore over my tweets looking for a mistake”.
Donald Trump’s tweet on the 3rd of July 2018. The actual post can be viewed at https://twitter.com/
realdonaldtrump/status/1014286054805987330?lang=en
33
Twitter is the official microblogging website. www.twitter.com
34
Twitonomy is a web-based source that provides twitter analytics on anyone's tweets. https://www.
twitonomy.com/
35
ProPublica contains a complete archive of the deleted tweets From Donald Trump. https://projects.
propublica. org/politwoops/user/realDonaldTrump
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identification of Malaprops, the erroneously written real words, sharing their pronunciation
and/or orthographic formation significantly with the necessitated words. All other mistakes
were overlooked.
Findings and Analysis
Analysis divulges the existence of conspicuous linguistic incoherence in tweets of the President
Donald Trump. Frequent spelling mistakes and constant violations of the standard
punctuational obligations reflect this incoherency. Though the vocabulary he uses in his tweets,
to convey the message consist of simple words, but still it appears that he often gets himself
tangled up in syntactic and semantical circlets of the language that results in tweets,
unintentionally, loaded with comedic effects. Staying within the proximity of the study
limitations, the researcher remained evasive to the tweets with spelling errors, punctuation
mistakes and other related orthographic errors. Interestingly, even after giving this large-scale
benefit of doubt to the President Donald Trump, Malaprops are still there in his tweets, giving
them a signature style identity. The following reproduced tweets, with bona fide Malaprops,
makes the researcher believe that the President has a penchant for Malapropisms.
Malaprop ‘Loose’ for ‘Lose’
The Malaprop emerges, here in this tweet, due to the mistaken orthographic representation of the
word ‘lose’. It appears that the similarity of sound and spellings of the words ‘lose’ and ‘loose’
dodged the President’ s cognitive proclivity towards his intended word. Instead of using the
verb ‘lose’ that refers to “failure in winning”, he used the adjective ‘loose’, extending altogether
different connotation that is “opposite to tightness”. Donald Trump, apparently, wanted to say
that Ted Cruz
36
, his competitor in the Republican Presidential nomination race, will not be able
to win against Hillary Clinton
37
, if got nominated as the Republican Presidential candidate.
36
Ted Cruz, a Senator from Texas remained the runner-up for the Republican presidential nomination in
the 2016 election.
37
Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate in the 2016 Presidential election, was defeated by the
Republican candidate, the current President, Donald Trump.
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Malaprop ‘Honer’ for ‘Honor’
The tweet is referring to the Republican Presidential debate held on the 25th of February 2016 in
Houston, Texas. The next morning, citing poll results, Donald Trump, a candidate for the
Presidency at that time, tweeted that he has performed better than his competitors in that
debate. He proclaimed this winning performance as a feeling of pride but for this self-
acknowledgment he keyed-in an erroneous word ‘honer’. The word ‘honer’, a noun, is a stone that
is meant to hone the cutting edges of various tools like knife, axe, etc. Matching his feelings of
privilege and pride, the right word is ‘honor’, a noun that means a feeling of pride and pleasure.
Malaprop ‘Payed’ for ‘Paid’
While composing this tweet, it appears that, the President Donald Trump remained
unsuccessful in retrieving the exact past tense of the verb ‘pay’ from his cognitive lexicon.
Grammatically, if the word ‘pay’ is used in the context of a financial transaction, the right past
tense for it is ‘paid’, not ‘payed’, as used by the President. The word ‘payed’ appears as a past tense
of the verb ‘pay” only if it is used in some reference to the nautical field and as this is not the case
here, the word does not suit the intelligibility of the tweet. The related context guides the
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researcher that the right word, here, should be ‘paid’ as the President is clearly referring to
monetary transactions.
Malaprop ‘Night’ for ‘Knight’
In this tweet, the President Donald Trump is talking about political support of the famous
American basketball coach Bobby Knight. Mr. Knight remained a staunch supporter of Donald
Trump during the Presidential election campaign. Though his support got recognition, yet his
last name ‘Knight’ got muddled-up by Donald Trump as he referred to it as ‘Night’ that is actually
a day circle time period. The researcher believes that the mix-up of these two concrete nouns, in
cognizance of the President, created this Malaprop. The word ‘Knight’, with the silent “K” is a
human name while the word ‘night’ refers to the time of darkness that comes between one day
and the next.
Malaprops ‘there’ for ‘their’ and ‘waist’ for ‘waste’
The tweet is loaded with two Malaprops. The first-one demonstrates Donald Trump’s confusion
in understanding the linguistic difference between the adverb ‘there’, referring to a place or
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location, and the possessive pronoun ‘their’, that relates something to ‘them’. From the tweet, it
appears that he is referring to the supporters of Bernie Sanders
38
and in this case the right word
that falls in line with the context is ‘their’, not ‘there’, as those supporters are humans, not
locations, and he is talking about ‘them’. The second Malaprop emerges from the confusion
gyrating around two nouns of similar articulatory sounds: ‘waist’ and ‘waste’. The word ‘waist’
used by the President Donald Trump means the part of human body that is between hips and
ribs but apparently the word does not serve his communicational intention. The intended word
here seems to be the noun ‘waste’ that means a bad usage of time.
Malaprop ‘waite’ for ‘wait’
Pragmatically, the intended word here seems to be ‘wait’, a noun denoting to a period of waiting.
In the tweet, the word ‘waite’ doesn’t make any semantic sense and obviously got erroneously
typed-in as a Malaprop, the researcher believes. The word ‘Waite’ is actually the last name of a
former Chief Justice, Morrison Waite (1874-88), of the United States of America. “…,why did the
White House wait so long to act?”, the President is, unquestionably, asking.
38
Bernie Sanders contested Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2016 Presidential elections
but couldn’t succeed.
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Malaprop ‘unpresidented’ for ‘unprecedented’
The Malaprop ‘unpresidented’, falls in the category of neologism and owes its creational allegiance
to the President, Donald Trump. The word has an amazing phonetic adjacency to the
necessitated word ‘unprecedented’, an adjective referring to an act that has never been done or is
known before. This self-coined word of the President received immediate world-wide attention,
once it appeared online, as it had never been heard and never been recorded, in the past, by any
dictionary. The Guardian
39
named ‘unpresidented’ as a word of the year and offered quite a few
interesting meanings and explanations to it. The management of the Merriam-Webster
40
,
America's most trusted dictionary, also tweeted its viewpoint on this linguistic creation of the
President.
Malaprop ‘gas’ for ‘has’
The mangled word in this tweet is ‘has’, appearing as a Malapropic word ‘gas’. The word ‘gas’ is a
noun that refers to an expandable substance. The combinational arrangement of this noun with
the verb ‘been’ in the form of ‘gas been’, as appeared in this tweet, is entirely unintelligible. English
syntax imparts that “has been”, as a present perfect tense, is used when the writers need to
describe a thing that was started in the past but is still going on in the present. It might be
otherwise, but the researcher’s best guess is that the nearness of the initial letters ‘g’ and ‘h’, of
both the words, in keyboard layout of computational devices, might have twisted the intended
word ‘has’ into the context inappropriate word ‘gas’.
39
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/19/unpresidented-trump-word-definition
40
https://twitter.com/merriamwebster/status/810117698558562304?lang=en
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Malaprop ‘hear by’ for ‘hereby’
‘Hear’ and ‘by’, are two separate words with particularized linguistic identities. The word ‘hear’,
in the form of a verb, means perceiving a sound with ears. The word ‘by’ is a preposition that
serves as a functional link to connect nouns, pronouns, or phrases to other words within a
sentence. Spoken in a sequence these two detached words ‘hear’ and ‘by’ sound alike the adverb
‘hereby’ that has altogether different connotations. The word ‘hereby’ is used to say “by the means
of this” or “as a result of this”. The superficial similarities in physiognomy of these words, the
researcher perceives, led the President substitute the right word ‘hereby’ with the Malaprop ‘hear
by’.
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Malaprop ‘Wires tapped’ for ‘Wiretapped’
The President Donald Trump intends to say that his predecessor, the President Barack Obama,
remained involved in the secret monitoring of his telephonic conversations. The grammatically
apposite word to describe this kind of act is ‘wiretapping’ denoting to the verb ‘wiretap’ that means
“listen to or record in secret”. The verb ‘wiretap’ turns into ‘wiretapped’ in its past tense and this
seems to be the intended word of the President here but due to the wrong retrieval from mental
lexicon, the President choose semantically erroneous words, ‘wires tapped’, to express his
displeasure and created a Malaprop. The word ‘Wires’, as a plural form of the noun ‘wire’, refer to
metal threads of different sizes with various levels of flexibility and ‘tapped’, a past tense of the
verb ‘tap’ means striking at some object lightly but audibly. Meanings of these two words ‘wires
tapped’ are altogether different from the word ‘wiretapped’ and their usage in this tweet creates an
absolute context inappropriateness.
Malaprop ‘Principals’ for ‘Principles’
The words, ‘principle’ and ‘principal’ are very well-known homophones. The president swapped
these words in this tweet and the result is Malapropism. The word “Principal” is used, as a noun
or adjective, depending upon the context of its usage. As a noun, the word refers to a person
with some position or authority while as an adjective it has specialized meanings in the fields of
finance and law. The word “Principle”, on the other hand, is a noun that refers to certain rules and
standards telling people about rights and wrongs. Based on the semantic differences of these
homophones, ‘Principles’, a plural form of the noun ‘principle’ is the precise word that complements
the communicational intent of the presidential tweet.
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Malaprop ‘council’ for ‘counsel’
The words ‘council’ and ‘counsel’ share homonymous characteristics: similarity of pronunciation
and dissimilarity of meaning. The word ‘counsel’, depending upon the compositional
requirements, is used as verb or as a noun. In the capacity of a verb, ‘counsel’ means “to advise”
and as a noun ‘counsel’ refers to “the individual doing the advising”. The homophone ‘councill’ is
conclusively used as a noun and refers to some “advisory committee, body or a professional
authority”. The context of the tweet suggests that by the phrase “W. H. Council”, the President
means the “White House designated Attorney”. In this linguistic reference, the appropriate
word to serve the communicational intent of the President is ‘counsel’ and the used word ‘council’
is a Malaprop.
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Malaprop ‘heel’ for ‘heal’
Linguistic properties of both the words, ‘heel’ and ‘heal’, are homophonous. The word ‘heel’ as a
noun, refers to the component of a shoe and/or to the body part that we know as the back part,
right below the ankle, of our foot. The word ‘heal’ as a verb, on the other hand, means recovering
from some weakness and becoming healthy again. The President is tweeting about making
American society and economy strong and healthy again but with the mistakenly opted word, a
Malaprop ‘heel’.
Malaprop ‘their’ for ‘there’
The words ‘their’ and ‘there’ resemble each other due to the shared phonetic physiognomy but
differ stylistically. The word ‘their’ is a possessive form of the pronoun ‘they’, and determines the
ownership of a particular thing to ‘them’. The word ‘there’, conversely, is an adverb, and refers to
a certain place. Semantically, both the words cannot be swapped, due to their different
meanings. In the tweet, the President is referring to Afghanistan, a country, so grammatically the
right choice is the word ‘there’. The word ‘their’ is a Malaprop here.
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Malaprop ‘to’ for ‘too’
These phonetic twins extend different meanings and are used in different linguistic
surroundings. The word ‘to’ is a preposition that is used to show direction towards some place
or event, whereas the word ‘too’ is an adverb referring to something in addition or in excess and
it frequently get substituted with the other words like ‘also’ and ‘very’. The content of the tweet
reflects that the word ‘to’, opted by the President, does not fall in line with the essence of the
text and is a Malaprop. “Too bad for the Dems….” is what the tweet means in actual.
Malaprop ‘Session’ for ‘Sessions’
The President, in this tweet, swapped the last name of the former U.S. Attorney General Jeff
‘Sessions’
41
with another noun ‘Session’ and this, a possibly inadvertent replacement, resulted in
Malapropism. The keyboarded word ‘session’, a noun, is used to describe a period of sitting or a
meeting of a parliament or a judicial committee or any other professional body, when these
institutions meet to conduct their designated procedural work.
41
Jefferson "Jeff" Sessions served the United States of America as its 84th Attorney General, from 2017 to
2018.
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Malaprop ‘dieing’ for ‘dying’
The word ‘dying’, is an adjective that means “about to die” or “on the verge of death” and this is
exactly what the crux of the tweet is. The President intended to convey that the professional
career of Alex Baldwin
42
, that was about to end, got rebirth after he started impersonating the
President Trump in his show. As the word ‘dying’ is an offshoot of the verb ‘die’, supposedly, the
President got perplexed, the researcher perceives so, on its spellings and composed it as ‘dieing’.
This is, in fact, a wrong formation of the word if its usage is in the context of a death. In this case
the word ‘die’ becomes ‘dying’, not ‘dieing’ as is mentioned in the text of the tweet. This is clearly a
Malaprop. The used word ‘dieing’, in actual, refers to the specialized work, cutting out metal
shapes, that is performed with or on a die-cast machine.
42
Alexander Baldwin is an American actor, writer, producer, comedian, and political activist. Mr.
Baldwin acts as Donald Trump for NBC's show Saturday Night Live.
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Malaprop ‘core’ for ‘corps’
The words ‘core’ and ‘corps’ are characterized with heterogeneity in their formational and
semantic values but are in homogeneity when it comes to their pronunciation. The word ‘core’ as
a noun means the innermost, central or the most vital part of something. The word ‘corps’, with
its origin from the French language, on the other hand, refers to a body or a group of people who
work in an associated or closely linked professional environment. The word ‘corps’, a noun with
the silent ‘p’ is pronounced in similarity with the English word “core”. The Malaprop is quite
noticeable here as the President is writing about an event that he attended with soldiers of the
American “Marine Corps”
43
, a subdivision of the U. S. armed forces.
43
https://www.marines.mil/
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Malaprop ‘roll’ for ‘role’
“Money from the campaign, or campaign contributions, played no ‘role’ in this transaction,” this
message, seems to be the writing intention behind this tweet of the President. But, it looks like
that the cognitive misperception led him towards the wrong choice of the word ‘roll’ that is
identical in pronunciation to his intended word ‘role’. The word ‘roll’, as per the contextual
demand, is used as a noun and/or as a verb, like noun in edible “spring roll” and “roll call list” and
as a verb to describe a “rotational and turning move”. The word ‘role’, on the other hand, is used
in the form of a noun only and denotes to “a played part by anyone or anything in some event”.
Malaprop ‘Melanie’ for ‘Melania’
The President, in this tweet, substituted the name of his own wife ‘Melania’ with another
womanly name ‘Melanie’. There exists alphabetical similarity of the first five constructional
letters (M , E, L, A, N ,I) of both the names with a kind of similar phonetic value and this
resemblance might have been, as per the researcher’s best guess, reason for the erroneous
orthographic processing of the First Lady’s name in this tweet. Interestingly, both the names are
linguistically interconnected too. The name Melanie is originally derived from the Greek
μελανία
44
that means Melania in English.
44
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanie
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Malaprop ‘are’ for ‘our’
The word ‘are’ is a verb and the word ‘our’ is a possessive pronoun for ‘we’, determining
ownership or belonging of something to “us”. Both the words, ‘are’ and ‘our’ are semantically
dissimilar and their syntax doesn’t support mutual replacements. Though phonetically these
words do not extend similar sounds, yet, these days, speakers of English language in their casual
conversations, blend the pronunciation of these two words and utter them as ‘R’. The same
casual style of pronunciation resulted in the creation of this Malaprop in the tweet, the
researcher believes. The President is referring to “Our military” and to “Our Vets”. It, definitely,
cannot be “Are Vets”.
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Malaprop ‘pour’ for ‘pore’
Phonetically, the words ‘pore’ and ‘pour’ are homophones. Both the words share similarity of
pronunciation but have different meanings. The word ‘pore’, as a verb, means “to read or study
something with attention and consideration” and is usually followed by ‘over’. The word ‘pour’ as
a verb, on the other hand, refers to a “rapid and steady flow of some liquid in the form of a
stream”. The President, in this tweet, intends to say that his opponents, in media, used to ‘pore
over’ his tweets in order to find out his writing mistakes. Interestingly, while establishing the
argument in favor of his language competency and writing ability, the President indulged in
Malapropism by replacing the contextually required phrase ‘pore over’ with the erroneous
expression ‘pour over’.
Malaprop ‘Barrack’ for ‘Barack’
The replacement of the word ‘Barack’ with ‘Barrack’ resulted in Malapropism in this tweet. The
used word ‘Barrack’ is a noun that refers to a building used for military accommodation in
designated areas of a military base. The required word ‘Barack’ is the first name of the former
American President, Barack Hussein Obama. The used and the intended words share, a close,
alphabetical similarity but are very different in sounds.
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Malaprop ‘taxis’ for ‘taxes’
The Malaprop here, in this tweet, is the word ‘taxis’, a plural form of the noun ‘taxi’, a means of
transport, also referred to as a taxicab. The content of the tweet reflects that the presence of the
word ‘taxis’ is a complete misfit in this piece of writing. The contextually fit word here seems to
be ‘taxes’, a plural noun for the word ‘tax’ that refers to a mandatory contribution of citizens, to
the state revenue, imposed by the governments, on their earnings or monetary gains.
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Malaprop ‘boarder’ for ‘border’
These two different nouns, ‘boarder’ and ‘border’, share homophonic characteristics, pronounced
same but have different spellings and meanings. The word ‘boarder’ refers to a person, especially a
student, who lives in a lodging where the meals are provided on payment. The word ‘border’, on
the other hand, means a boundary or a demarcation line separating apart two geographical areas.
The President’s tweet is about the border wall, between Mexico and the United States, that he
intends to build as per the election campaign commitment. Malapropism emerged in the last line
of the tweet due to the substitution of the context appropriate word ‘border’ with the wrong
word ‘boarder’. “Nancy and Chuck must approve ‘border’ Security and the Wall!”, he means, in
actual.
Malaprop ‘smocking’ for ‘smoking’
The president substituted the word ‘smoking’ with ‘smocking’ twice in this tweet. The word
‘smoking’ is a constituent of the term ‘Smoking Gun’ that refers to the evidence, of a wrongdoing,
that is convincing and indubitable. And, this is the term, the President intended to use. He
believes that there exists no evidential proof of the wrongdoing, the Democrats are trying to
establish against him. The mistakenly used word ‘smocking’ appears as a Malaprop here. ‘Smocking’
is the embroidery technique used to knit fabric in the way that it can stretch. There exists no
‘gun’ to do ‘smocking’ and, surely, this is also not what the President is referring to.
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Malaprop ‘capital’ for ‘capitol’
The word ‘capital’, as a noun, refers to the central city of a country, a center for the state
government and its administrative functionaries. For example, Washington, D.C. is the capital
city of the United States of America. The word ‘capitol’, also a noun, on the other hand, is the
building, commonly referred to as the “Capitol Hill”. The American legislative body, Congress,
used to hold its sessions in this building. In the United States of America ‘Capitol’ is in the
‘Capital’. From the context of the tweet, it is obvious that the President is referring to the “Capitol
Hill” and not to the “Capital City”.
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Malaprops ‘their’ for ‘there’ and ‘by’ for ‘buy’
There are two Malaprops in this tweet, ‘their’ and ‘by’. The Malaprops and the words needed,
‘there’ and ‘buy’, are homonyms, pronounced alike but loaded with divergent meanings. To start
with the word ‘their’, an adjective, is used to determine the ownership of things to ‘them’. The
milieu of the tweet reflects that the word ‘their’ doesn’t belong to the context, it is used in. The
required word, here, should be ‘there’, an adverb, that is used to establish a link to some matter or
relation. “There is no reason for the U.S. consumer….”, is what the President, of course, means
here. The next one is the substitution of the word ‘buy’ with ‘by’. The word 'by' is a preposition,
used to display the identification of someone or something performing an action. The word 'buy',
on the other hand, is a verb, that means to purchase something. “Tariffs can be completely
avoided if you buy from….”, is what, the President’s tweet means, the researcher believes.
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Malaprop ‘moot’ for ‘moat’
The word ‘moot’ is a Malaprop in this tweet. The word ‘moot’ is an adjective and it refers to
anything that is subject to a debate or dispute. The word ‘moat’, a noun, on the other hand,
means a deep and wide ditch that encircles some place. As a ‘moat’ is intended for defense against
possible attacks, it is filled with water so that the enemy couldn’t reach the place. “…I wanted a
Moat stuffed with…”, is what the President is saying here. And, the context is his proposed
border wall on the Southern Border of the United States that it shares with Mexico.
Malaprop ‘county’s’ for ‘country’s’
The word Malaprop here is the word ‘county’ as it replaced the contextually apposite word
‘country’. The word ‘county’, a noun, refers to a smaller administrative unit of a province or a state.
For example, all the 50 states of the United States of America consist of various counties. On the
other way around, all these 50 states, with their counties, make the United States of America a
single unit in the form of a ‘country’. In brief, a ‘country’ is a combination of many ‘’counties and a
‘county’ is one of the smaller units of a ‘country’. In this tweet, the word ‘county’ with an added
apostrophe is used as a possessive noun in a wrong semantic sense. As per the context, it should
have been otherwise, “….in our Country’s history”.
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Malaprop ‘hose’ for ‘house’
The word ‘hose’, a noun, refers to a flexible tube that passes on water and is commonly used for
watering plants. The word ‘house’, on the other hand, refers to a building. In its political context,
the word ‘house’ is referred to the chamber of a parliament. For example, in the United States of
America, the lower ‘house’ of the parliament, Congress, is called the House of Representatives.
The President, in this tweet is talking about the ‘house’ of parliament and not about the ‘hose’ of
parliament. The word ‘hose’ is a Malaprop.
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Malaprop ‘eminent’ for ‘imminent’
Both the adjectives, ‘eminent’ and ‘imminent’ are homophones with absolute dissimilar meanings.
While, the word ‘eminent’ describes someone who is well-known, the word ‘imminent’ refers to
some event that is about to happen, anytime, in the near future. The President’s intended word
seems to be ‘imminent’ here but presumably, the similar phonetic physiognomies of the word
‘eminent’ led him towards this mistaken typography, resulting in Malapropism.
Malaprop ‘whose’ for ‘who’s’
Syntax of the English language guides that these two homophones, ‘whose’ and ‘who’s’, are not
interchangeable. The word ‘whose’, a possessive form of the pronoun ‘who’, determines the
belonging of something to someone. The word ‘who’s’, on the other hand, is a contractional form
of the words ‘who’ and ‘is’. When written together, in a shortened form, the omitted letter ‘i’ get
replaced with an apostrophe. In this tweet the word ‘whose’ is a Malaprop for the word ‘who’s’.
“….the foreperson of the jury, who’s also a lawyer, by the way”, the President intends to say here.
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Malaprop ‘chocker’ for ‘choker’
The word ‘choker’ is a noun that refers to something that is worn closely on the neck or at throat,
like a collar or a necklace. Informally, the word ‘choker’ is also used for a person who fails to do
something due to his or her nervousness. The word ‘chocker’, on the hand, is an adjective and
means “tightly packed with people”. The word ‘chocker’ is also in use as a British slang, meaning
“irritated and/or fed-up”. The context of the tweet reflects that the intended word of the
President is ‘choker’ with its informal reference. “Also, as a mayor he was very bad under pressure
– a choker!, this is what the President means in this tweet, the researcher believes. The word
‘chocker’ is a Malaprop.
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Malaprop ‘ahead’ for ‘head’
The word ‘ahead’ is an adverb that extends semantic senses like “further forward in time”, “in
advance”, “in the near future”, etc. The word ‘head’, as a noun, on the other hand, refers to the
body part at the upper end of the human body. It is also used for someone with a “highest rank”
or “top position” like a leader. The intended word here seems to be ‘head’ not ‘ahead’ as used. “...
Yet your Governor, Gretchen “Half” Whitmer is way in over her head, she…”, the President
means.
Malaprop ‘Noble’ for ‘Nobel’
The words ‘noble’ and ‘Nobel’ are homophones. The word ‘Nobel’, a noun, is related to the
international prize, named as the “Nobel Prize”. The prize is given, each year, to certain
individuals for their highest achievements in various fields of life. The word ‘noble’, an adjective,
on the other hand, refers to the characteristics like “moral, honest, brave and kind”, etc. In the
tweet, the contextually appropriate word is ‘Nobel’ as the President is talking about the “Nobel
Prize”. But, inappropriately, he has referred to the word ‘Nobel’ wrongly by replacing it with its
Malaprop ‘noble’, three times in the tweet.
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Malaprop ‘both’ for ‘booth’
The word ‘booth’ is a noun that refers to a kiosk or a certain enclosure of a small size that can
accommodate one person in a standing position. The word ‘both’, on the other hand, is a plural
pronoun that determines identification of togetherness of two persons or things like “each of the
two’, “one and the other’, etc. The word ‘both’ is a Malaprop in this tweet as it doesn’t fit in the
context of the sentence. The apposite word, the President missed here is ‘booth’ that, as per the
context of the tweet, means a kiosk, used as a “voting booth”, where a single person at a time can
go and cast his or her vote.
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Conclusion
The tweets from the President Trump’s personal Twitter handle @realDonaldTrump are not
only syntactic flubs, stuffed with semantic mistakes, but are also reflections of, what Hessell
45
(2018) mentions as, linguistic solipsism. Like a semantic solipsist, the President has his
personalized take on the linguistic orthography. Most of his tweets come loaded with self-
celebratory language. Pragmatically, the content of his tweets reflects that he, putting away the
existing actualities, talks only about his self-conceived ideas and while doing so, he attaches
custom-made meanings to his words, somehow, strange or new to the syntactic and semantic
domains. This linguistic deficit doesn’t match with his writing profile as an author of the several
best-seller books
46
.
It is widely acknowledged that good readers become good writers. The words we read
somewhere echo when we write something. In the words of Prose
47
(2006) “the more we read,
the faster we can perform that magic trick of seeing how the letters have been combined into
words that have meaning”. But, unfortunately as mentioned by Wolf
48
(2018), the President is
not in the habit of reading a lot. In this situation, it would be a fair guess that the President’s
writing output is mainly dependent on his listening and speaking skills. Commonly known fact
is that the reconstruction of phonetic sounds, of the listened or spoken words, in a written form
is not a simple task. There is a high probability of being tricked during the manipulating
process, classification and segmentation, of phonemes and the result is Malapropism based on
the similarities of constituting syllables, stress patterns and lexical categories of the words. On
the other hand, reading helps a writer understand phonological, orthographic and semantic
differences and contextual relationships of the words in order to produce intelligible writings.
45
Hessell, C. (2018). Solipsism and the Self in Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Journal of the History of
Philosophy, 56(1), 127-154.
46
https://www.amazon.com/Donald-J.-Trump/e/B001H6O8M2%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share
47
Prose, F. (2006) Reading Like a Writer. (Francine Prose is a famous American Novelist and critic. The
given quote is from her interview in which she talks about creativity, literary craftsmanship, and her new
book, Reading Like a Writer. The details are available at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/
archive/2006/08/close-reading/305038/
48
Wolff, M. (2018). Fire and fury. Hachette UK.
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At the same time, there is another side of the story too. It turns out that the linguistic quirks are
not affecting the President’s digital engagement at all. For instance, Pavek
49
(2018) mentions in
his study that the President doesn’t appear to be negatively hurt due to his twitter related
behaviours. The results of a survey, conducted by Gallup
50
, depict that 76% of Americans see,
read or hear about Trump's tweets. Linguistic weirdness, in general, and the poor syntax of his
tweets, in particular, might be a point of concern for linguists, but this awkwardness has created
his image as a hard liner, bold and a direct politician, in the eyes of his sympathisers. Graves
51
(2017) names his raw and unmannered approach, towards the usage of this social media
platform, as the sign of an anti-establishment politician. Graves also believes that the
incoherency of the President’s writing style is received by his sympathisers as the reflection of a
real person who embraces the humanizing quality of his errors and is not a representative of the
political elite with a typical cadence and refinement as his hallmark. Some hearsay, according to
Linskey
52
(2018), even propagate that the President’s tweets are intendedly spiced up with poor
syntax and misspelled words that, from the viewpoint of his supporters, suit his provocative
style. Well, it might be true from some perspective but, the researcher maintains that
Malapropism is certainly not a stylistic choice as no one can get convinced that it has been done
intentionally to create or maintain a signature style.
As the findings fall in line with the study’s alternative hypothesis, the researcher concludes that
the phonetic and orthographic adjacency of words frequently tricks President Trump’s cognitive
competence and his articulatory mechanism, responsible for producing speech, often defy his
writing intentions with the wrong retrieval of semantically non-specific words from his mental
lexicon. As a result, the way he mangles words, it looks like the ghost of Mrs. Malaprop haunts
his vocabulary.
49
Pavek, J. (2018). Tweets from the Bully Pulpit: President Trump’s Twitter habits and his Popularity.
https://www.bemidjistate.edu/academics/departments/political-science/wp-content/uploads/sites/
40/2018/09/pavek-thesis.pdf
50
For details, https://news.gallup.com/poll/234509/deconstructing-trump-twitter.aspx
51
Graves, L. (2017, December 31). Words fail Trump but for supporters his message is loud and clear. The
Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/usnews/2017/dec/31/words-fail-trump-but-for-
supporters-his-message-is-loud-and-clear
52
Linskey, A. (2018) Inside the Trump Tweet Machine: Staff-written posts, bad grammar (on purpose),
and delight in the chaos. The article is available at, https://www3.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2018/
05/21/trump-tweets-include-grammatical-errors-and-some-them-are-purpose/JeL7AtKLPevJDIIOMG7
TrN/story.html?event=event 25&arc404 =true