Advertisement

Supported by

Guest Essay

By Adam Aleksic

Mr. Aleksic is an American linguist and the author of “Algospeak.”

“Many such cases.” “Many people are saying this.”

You may recognize these phrases as “Trumpisms” — linguistic coinages of President Trump — but they’ve also become ingrained in our collective vocabulary. Since they became popular as memes during his first presidential campaign, we have begun using them, first sardonically, and then out of habit.

If you search for “many such cases” on X, you’ll see new posts of the phrase seemingly every minute, primarily applied to nonpolitical contexts like work anxiety or the real estate market. Google Trends shows both expressions increasing in usage since the mid-2010s.

This is remarkable, given how quickly memes typically die out. Internet humor usually follows transient fads, but these phrases associated with the president seem to have found a more permanent home in the English language.

The difference is in how his ideas spread and mutate through the language he uses. Mr. Trump’s speech, evolving in the social media era, is overwhelmingly entering language through online jokes, but then sticking around in our actual conversations. The Trumpisms that stay are well suited for virality and recombination through algorithmic media. They’re no longer being used in direct reference to the original joke, because they can be reapplied to everyday situations.

You could argue that Mr. Trump’s language is predisposed to becoming “memeified” on social media platforms and is reshaping our reality as a result.

Mr. Trump’s impact reaches well beyond just two phrases. Since he helped popularize “sad!” as an interjection, I regularly hear people use it that way as well; something similar is in effect with “frankly,” “fake news” and the discourse marker “believe me” at the end of a sentence. All of these terms were buoyed by Mr. Trump’s usage, turned into ironic callbacks (including by his supporters), and then incorporated into everyday speech. In........

© The New York Times