Ren the Ghost

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69315&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=big-beautiful-bill

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69315

Trump’s favorite verbal tic is now 1,000 pages of legislation
He keeps using that word. I do not think it means what he thinks it means.
Monica Hesse, WP (5/29/25)

Everybody has what I call a kǒutóuchán 口頭禪 (lit., "oral zen", i.e., "favorite expression", kind of like a mantra).  Mine, in Nepali, is "bāphre bāph!"; Pinkie Wu's, in Cantonese, is "wah!"; a Harvard historian I know loves to say "precisely!"; and so forth and so on.  President Trump's is "beautiful".

Monica Hesse opines:

N.B.:  I have omitted most hyperlinks in the quoted text below.

The verbal tic of President Donald Trump that has always most fascinated me is his predilection for the word “beautiful.” North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un “wrote me beautiful letters and we fell in love.” On the cover of Time magazine, Kamala Harris looked “like the most beautiful actress ever to live” (this quickly devolved into an anti-compliment). On Trump’s first day back in office, he signed an executive order titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture.” Golf courses are beautiful, but so are White House telephones, farming, fighter jets, notes from the Chinese president, chocolate cake, the Supreme Court, Harambe the gorilla and Christians. Do you know who doesn’t need 30 dolls? “A beautiful baby girl that’s 11 years old.”

Is this a vocabulary deficit? A real estate developer buzzword, such as “spacious” or “walk-in pantry”? Is this a manifestation, a linguistic trick to make it appear that everything is better than fine? In college, did he fulfill a gen ed requirement with a course on the history of aesthetics?

I have gone down a rabbit hole. Did you know that there is a whole field called phonaesthetics, which is the study of how pleasing words are to the ear? Unpleasing sounds are called “cacophonous”; pleasing words are “euphonious.” One of the fathers of this field was J.R.R. Tolkien (yes, that one), who taught English at the University of Oxford and worked on the Oxford English Dictionary and declared that the most melodious word combination in English was "cellar door." Words are more likely to be thought of as euphonious if they have three or more syllables, with the stress on the first syllable. The most euphonious letter is “l,” followed by “m,” “s” and “n”; the most euphonious vowel sounds are short rather than long.

“Beautiful” fits many of those criteria, which makes me wonder if it’s as simple as that. Trump is human, like the rest of us, and he is just as drawn to pleasing words as any of us, and “beautiful” is a more pleasing word than, say, “pretty” — though not as pleasing as “luminous.”

Next, Hesse waxes linguistic:

Then again, the Oxford English Dictionary — and I just paid $10 for a subscription to learn this, so now I have to share it with you — says that “beautiful,” in terms of usage, is about as common as the words “facility,” “solve” and “travel,” and Trump definitely doesn’t use those words with any noteworthy frequency. The OED also tells me that the word peaked in 1850. By 1946, when Trump was born, it was in a steep decline and reached its lowest usage point in 1980, when Trump was 34 years old and a television interviewer was first asking the young tycoon whether he’d ever consider running for president.

Trump uses “beautiful” to describe sleeping gas (“They have a gas that’s a beautiful sleeping gas”). He uses it to describe fossil fuels (“clean, beautiful coal”). He uses it to describe his unrealized health-care plans, airports, his physical body (“If I took this shirt off, you’d see a beautiful, beautiful person”). Politico published a list last year aggregating weird times he’s used the word, and until I clicked on it, I had almost forgotten about when he celebrated the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi by praising “a dog, a beautiful dog” and also the “beautiful, big hole” created by the U.S. military when it blasted through Baghdadi’s house during a raid.

I spend a lot of time preoccupied with language: how it works and why it works and whom it works for. What I think I find most jarring about Trump and “beautiful” is how many times he uses the word to describe something I find to be the opposite. He tweets about the removal of “beautiful” Confederate statues and monuments — but it doesn’t matter how regal the statues look, because they represent something nauseating and tragic. Trump posts an AI-generated video depicting a resort built on the rubble of Gaza, and the resort is supposed to be beautiful, but it only feels horrifying.

…

Which brings me to the reason I am writing this. Trump has named his signature agenda — which the House has passed, which the Senate will consider, which will form and shape America and determine our values — the One Big Beautiful Bill.

The Big Beautiful Bill works for Donald Trump because it uses a common, euphonious word to sell a tantalizing concept: that the federal government is simple instead of being a giant, complicated mess — but one that got that way for a reason. To fix it, you don’t need wonks, economists, the swamp, the “deep state,” lawyers, laws or elaborate tax codes; you just need to clonk it upside the head with the Big Beautiful Bill.

The “the” is intentional. The Big Beautiful Bill is the One Ring of legislation, the only bill you’ll ever need. “Big Beautiful Bill” is a phrase that could lull you into believing it contained only good things. And it does not.

Here's how the proponents of Trump's “Big Beautiful Bill” depicted it on placards when they were ushering it through Congress:

_______________________

ONE BIG

BEAUTIFUL

BILL ACT

_________________________

(images)

Hesse has written a profoundly probing essay on how language functions and means.  The upshot of it all is that we need to add, in addition to its esthetic dimensions, a new Trumpian definition for it in our dictionaries: 

adj. that which performs its intended function efficiently and effectively

This is the engineers' definition of "beautiful".  It reminds me of the mathematicians' definition of "neat" which I learned when I hung around with them in graduate school"

adj. that which arrives at a solution efficiently, effectively, and concisely.

The BBB — in the minds of its proponents.

Selected readings

• "'Bāphre bāph!' — my favorite Nepali expression" (8/12/18)
• "The beauty and power of spelling" (9/3/21)

[Thanks to François Lang]

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69315&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=big-beautiful-bill

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69315