this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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hey that's ableist!
apart from that, yeah i agree with you. in general, if you compare Trump's and Hitler's speeches, you can see how extremely complicated some sentences that Hitler said were. Watch some (AI english dubbed, starting around 30 seconds in). Compare that to Trump's speeches, whose vocabulary seems to consist of 5 words.
Yeah, quality has gone down, it seems. I just talked to my aunt and grandma about this exact same thing yesterday. Everything seems to gradually loose quality, or in other words, enshittify.
(btw, i do not mean to say that Hitler's speeches were "good"; i was merely pointing out that the clarity of expression has gone down. The same can be seen with automobiles, houses, and many other things.)
Btw, I remember reading an article that said, after 2000, universities in the USA specifically tried to erode clarity in speech, because they found it proper. It's called post-structuralism; structuralism referring to "clarity". I hoped i summarized that well.
It might have something to do, or not, but it definitely is a coincidence.
Yeah, if you follow the Flesch-Kincaid reading level of Presidential speeches over time, that's another way you can broadly track American English just literally being dumbed down over time.
Trump basically only speaks in stream of consciousness, run-on sentences that are so vague that my 6th grade English teacher would describe as 'word vomit.'
Speaking of 6th grade... the average adult American reading proficiency is now between a 5th and 6th grader.
Less than 10% of the population is capable of critically comparing contrasting stories about the same thing from different sources, and pointing out their differences and comparative biases.
Something like 30% of the population is functionally illiterate, only able to read extremely simple instructions and basically children's books.
EDIT: Also, its not a coincidence.
Republicans, for longer than I've been alive, have been wrecking public education.
Why? Stupid people are easier to lie to.