The UK's beleagured Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, did something similar early in hus tenrue, when he voiced the phrase "strong message here" as a part of a conference speech: This is somehow reminiscent of the hilarious dual-language cock-ups where bits of surrounding rubric like "continued overleaf" get incorporated into the copy.Ĭouple of similar examples below, though not quite what I mean: Usually uttered in the final panel when theĬhief protagonist had just experienced a suitably grisly denouement. My favourite was *choke* from the old EC comics. I'd say that's the equivalent of what Hilary was doing. It may or may not be relevant that both SIGH and GULP are used – untranslated – in Italian comic books, and are sometimes used jocularly in speech (pronounced and, of course). I can attest from personal experience that *sigh* was common in email communications at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, as was the use of "sigh" and "mumble" in spoken conversation in place of actual sighs and mumbles. Even so, this spoken "sigh" sounds like what a good number of my academic colleagues (mostly women?) say on a daily basis. I am anything *but* a supporter of Hillary. I'll go out on a limb and say this isn't teleprompter, just idiolect. Also "quote unquote", which my husband has caught from me. I did get called on it once as a kid, but I still say it frequently. Filed by Ben Zimmer under Language and politics, Pragmatics.I wouldn't be surprised if Hillary read a lot of Peanuts growing up. Clinton's usage certainly seemed playful to me, a kind of "whaddyagonnado" reaction to Trump's insinuations about her Methodist faith: So perhaps the style of writing out *sigh*/*cough*/*yawn* in comic strips helped to encourage the use of these words as playful interjections in other discursive contexts, both written and spoken. (Think of *scribbles furiously*, *golf clap*, etc.) I looked at how bounding asterisks may have their roots in comic-strip representations of expressive non-verbal noises, like Charlie Brown's *sigh* in Peanuts: This is all reminiscent of a phenomenon I wrote about in a post a few years ago, " The cyberpragmatics of bounding asterisks." As I discussed there, bounding asterisks (and sometimes other characters) have come to indicate "autonomous stage directions" in online communication, to use a term introduced by Francisco Yus. The major dictionaries don't seem to have caught up with interjectional "sigh," though Wiktionary has it covered with this definition: "An expression of fatigue, exhaustion, grief, sorrow, frustration, or the like, often used in casual written contexts." Example: " Sigh, I'm so bored at work today." So was Clinton's "sigh," even if it was on the teleprompter, really the gaffe/flub/oops/blunder that The Hill would like us to think it was? Using "sigh" as an arch interjection isn't all that unusual in real-life contexts, even if it tends to appear in written rather than spoken English. And in Clinton's case, it overlaps with another trope, " Saying Sound Effects Out Loud." TVTropes lists lots of examples from TV, movies, and other media, including verbalized "sighs," "coughs," and "yawns." Trump is so bad on the teleprompter, I'm just waiting for him to say, "hold for applause."īoth Clinton and Trump are falling prey to an old comedic trope: " Reading the Stage Directions Out Loud," as the ever-reliable TVTropes site calls it. Trump's performance generated some teleprompter humor too. Meanwhile, the same day as Hillary's North Carolina stop, Donald Trump gave a speech in New York using a teleprompter, a contrast to his usual off-the-cuff speaking style. In Garland's item for The Hill, he took Clinton to task for "reading 'sigh' off the teleprompter rather than actually sighing," though he admitted "it's unclear whether Clinton intentionally read the word or whether 'sigh' was actually a cue for her to sigh audibly." Just to encourage the idea that this was some sort of ludicrous faux pas, the post's slug line is "teleprompter-gaffe-flub-oops-blunder-hillary-clinton-sigh." Eric Garland of The Hill shares a video of Hillary Clinton at a June 22 campaign appearance in North Carolina, and it provides ammunition those who would like to portray her as a soulless automaton vainly trying to seem like an authentic human being.
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