One of the many questions about Sunday’s presidential debate is this: Will Donald Trump interrupt Hillary Clinton as many times as he did during their first encounter? After half an hour of that debate, a blogger for the Huffington Post declared, “This is what manterrupting looks like.”
Manterrupting — the constant interruption of a woman by a man — is one of several new or unfamiliar terms that have come to the fore during this strange presidential campaign. The unusual levels of bile, venom and vitriol that have characterized the campaign extend down to the very meanings of words that are used.
Take “mansplain,” for instance. To many Clinton supporters, Trump is a classic mansplainer. As one definition on the Urban Dictionary website puts it, to mansplain is “to delight in condescending, inaccurate explanations delivered with rock-solid confidence of rightness and that slimy certainty that of course he is right, because he is the man in this conversation.” But another definition on the site defines “mansplain” as follows: “Stating verifiable facts that are inconvenient to the feminist worldview.”
“Manterrupting” and “mansplaining” are words I’ve heard more often in the past few months than ever before. But they’re not the only ones. Take POTUS and SCOTUS, for instance. Clinton and Trump are the two major contenders to be elected POTUS — President of the United States — and one reason the election is so important is that there’s a vacancy to be filled on SCOTUS —the Supreme Court. POTUS and SCOTUS were originally code terms transmitted over telegraph wires; now they’re widely used in print and even in conversation. An acronym that may become familiar only if Trump wins the election is FLOTUS — the First Lady. It’s hard to see Bill Clinton in that role.
Back to the campaign. Trump, in particular, has been widely accused of “dog whistle” tactics. This phrase refers to a statement that has — apart from its ostensible meaning — a further connotation, aimed at a specific target audience. The first example in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from the Ottawa Citizen in 1995: “On the lips of Premier Mike Harris, the term ‘special interest’ has the tone of epithet. It’s an all-purpose dog whistle that those fed up with feminists, minorities, the undeserving poor hear loud and clear.” The expression appeared a few weeks ago in the Montreal Gazette, when the distinguished political columnist Don Macpherson wrote that Jean-François Lisée, running for the leadership of the Parti Québécois, “has exchanged his dog whistle for a bullhorn.”
South of the border, Hillary Clinton’s difficulties with her use of a private email server to conduct State Department business have been described as both “emailgate” and “servergate.” The final syllable is, of course, a reference to the Watergate scandal of the 1970s that drove Richard Nixon from office. Ronald Reagan endured “Irangate,” Janet Jackson’s wardrobe mishap on live TV produced “nipplegate” — the number of Americans linked to some kind of gate just keeps on growing.
Less predictably, “-ghazi” has now been added to the mix. When Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, four Americans died in an attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, the second-largest city in Libya. Tired of the endless parade of “gates,” some commentators have hauled “ghazi” in as a substitute. Thus, for example, the scandal over deflated footballs in the Super Bowl, widely known as “deflategate,” has also been called “ballghazi.” And “servergate” is a synonym for “emailghazi.”
An expression that seems much more likely to endure is “fat shaming,” and Donald Trump’s delight in humiliating Alicia Machado, a former beauty contest winner, is a perfect example of it. Indeed, given that Trump began to talk over Hillary Clinton when she raised the topic during the last debate, he was guilty of mansplaining and manterrupting, too.
markabley@sympatico.ca
