“I told May how to do Brexit,” he crowed—but a complex process like Brexit is more something one superintends, executes, or, even if one seeks a less lofty tone, handles. One does rock, paper, scissors; one does kegs at a frat party—upon which it is relevant that one talks of “doing Brexit” over beers. His take on immigration to Europe: “You go through certain areas that didn’t exist 10 or 15 years ago.” If Trump is perceiving new terrains emerging from the time-space continuum, it perhaps evidences the genius-level intelligence he imputes to himself.

But more plausibly, this was just unconsidered. Reading and hearing the president’s statements on grave matters of state, it’s hard to remember that it was the president who phrased them that way. Many find the way Trump expresses himself irritating, and not just in terms of uncharitable content, but in terms of sheer style and feel. Some have even speculated that his speech indicates mental deterioration.

However, what that analysis gains in drama it loses in scientific necessity. The essence of “Trumptalk” is something quite ordinary, what linguists call unmonitored language. The kink is that formality, impact, and gravity typically elicit monitored language. Writing is deliberate, allowing us to edit, amend, and correct. The formal statement—as in, to the American public and the world beyond—is typically either read from writing, or even if ad libbed is couched carefully and reflectively in the same air as writing. Unmonitored language is most of the language in the typical person’s life: casual speech, texts, tweets. Humans are genetically specified to use it and none has ever been known to lack it—it comes easily.

Trump takes it easy. It only compounds the pain and embarrassment so many Americans feel when watching spectacles such as his taking a knee before a foreign power accused of harming the U.S. electoral process. It’s bad enough that Trump lacks the substance to care about his job beyond how it impacts his score-keeping sense of ego. What makes it worse is that—in line with his lecturing government leaders on the basis of gut feelings, blithely stepping in front of the Queen, scarfing his Big Macs, and lacking an impulse to even pretend to have any interest in the arts—he is the first president who, rather than striding forward and speaking, just gets up and talks. Welcome to the queer circumstance of unmonitored language as officialese.

This improvisatory approach to communication explains all else that grates and perplexes about how this man shares his mind. Trump’s tweets often contain random capitalization: “Jerry Brown is trying to back out of the National Guard at the Border, but the people of the State are not happy. Want Security & Safety NOW!” Here, he is of all things antiquarian—by accident, of course. There was a vogue for using capitals in this way in English in the late-17th and early-18th centuries. Before English was standardized, many writers chose to capitalize words on a whim to lend a hit of Mrs. Dash. This was often done inconsistently, with some nouns capitalized and some not.