« previous post | next post »

The other day, someone asked me about the claim that "a whopping 78 percent of the words that Trump uses are monosyllabic".

We've previously debunked the idea that Trump's speeches aim at a fourth-grade reading level ("More Flesch-Kincaid grade level nonsense", 10/23/2015).

And long ago, we took aim at careless assertions about how young people/media/txting/etc. are degrading the language to the point that "the top 20 words used … account for a third of all words": "Britain's scientists risk becoming hypocritical laughing stocks, research suggests", 12/16/2006; "Only 20 words for a third of what they say: A replication", 12/16/2006; "Vicky Pollard's revenge", 1/2/2007.

So here's a quick evaluation of that "78 percent" claim.

Running a quick script over the lexical histograms for the third presidential debate, I get

Trump 5329/7113 = 74.9% monosyllables

Clinton 5112/7189 = 71.1% monosyllables

So Mr. Trump is not quite at 78% — but Senator Clinton is not far behind him.

As another point of comparison, I ran the same script over Terry Gross's 9/29/2014 Fresh Air interview with Lena Dunham, on the theory that Ms. Gross is widely recognized as the epitome of an intelligent conversationalist:

Dunham 4477/5740 = 78.0% monosyllables

Gross 1356/1715 = 79.1% monosyllables

The percentage of monosyllabic words means something, I guess — but surely it doesn't mean what the author of the "78 percent" claim meant it to imply.

[Note: For the Fresh Air interview, I used my own "disedited" transcript, which includes filled pauses (the monosyllables UM and UH) and false starts (many of which are monosyllabic). If all disfluencies were eliminated, the percentage of monosyllables would be a bit lower — but not by much. Thus removing all filled pauses would put Terry Gross at about 78.8% monosyllables.]

Permalink