"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," declared Noam Chomsky in 1957. It's a sentence which could be described, with the philosopher of language Donald Davidson, as "a nice derangement of epitaphs." These are examples of bits of the English language that have the form or appearance of being meaningful, but aren’t. Is it true that colorless green ideas sleep furiously? No. False, then? Well, no. Calling it false would be to indicate that colorless green ideas are wide awake, or that they sleep gently. Is some particular derangement of epitaphs really very nice? Neither yes nor no, it strikes me.
So, the bad part of going around saying things like "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is that it amounts to gobbledygook, although in this case rather intriguing and poetic-seeming gobbledygook. But the good part is that no one is going to accuse you of being a liar when you describe the derangement of epitaphs as being nice. They just won't have any idea what you can possibly mean.
All this to pad out the lede in a bid to intrigue you into another discussion of last Thursday's debate, in which the candidate of falsehood squared off against the candidate of nonsense. A thousand Tweets rolled my feed really quick: which would you rather have, a candidate who struggles to articulate, but who tells the truth, or a candidate who lies non-stop? Biden the truth-teller was everywhere, though I was more struck by Biden the name-caller ("You’re the sucker. You’re the loser.").
And I agree. I don't think Biden did a bunch of lying in that debate, and Trump certainly did.
Trump said that he offered Nancy Pelosi 10,000 National Guard troops before the January 6 riot, and she turned him down. He said the Democrats support post-birth abortion, which is impossible, really. He repeatedly said that Biden has a plan to quadruple your taxes. And it's also true, as many commentators lamented, that as Trump rattles off his distortions and fabrications, I've stopped really caring. I expect him to say whatever he thinks will help him get elected. But it's gross, and a president who lies continually is dangerous as well as reprehensible.
He did a bunch of truth-telling too, though: "No general got fired for the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, Afghanistan, where we left billions of dollars of equipment behind, we lost 13 beautiful soldiers and 38 soldiers were obliterated. And by the way, we left people behind too. We left American citizens behind."
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The advantage of grammar, syntax, and vernacular usage in English comes from the same source as its disadvantages: they enable you to say something true, but also enable you to say something false. Biden has the advantage that he can't say anything false, but the disadvantage that he can't say anything true (well, except that “sucker” thing.)
It’s cruel, but here are a few bits of Biden's presentation that have a "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" problem.
The idea that he did something that was significant. And the military—you know, when he was president, they were still killing people in Afghanistan. He didn’t do anything about that. When he was president, we still found ourselves in a position where you had a notion that we were this safe country. The truth is, I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any—this—this decade—doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world, like he did.
PolitiFact checked that as “false.” But is it about the century or the decade or the position where you had a notion we were this safe country? It can’t be false because it can’t be true, and vice versa. It doesn’t rise to the level of meaning.
Try this one:
What I’m going to do is fix the taxes. For example, we have a thousand trillionaires in America—I mean, billionaires in America. And what’s happening? They’re in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2 percent in taxes. If they just paid 24 percent or 25 percent, either one of those numbers, they’d raised $500 million—billion dollars, I should say, in a 10-year period.
We’d be able to right—wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that—all those things we need to do, childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the COVID—excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with. Look, if—we finally beat Medicare.
I don't want to do this. But you're making me, by insisting that Biden is a truth-teller. You should’ve stuck with “he's not a false-teller.” He's speaking, but not making assertions. He's passionate, but he can't say what about. He might’ve turned out to be a truth-teller in that debate if we could have plausibly assigned antecedents to his pronouns, or subjects to his predicates. But we couldn’t.
Look, there’s so many young women who have been—including a young woman who just was murdered and he went to the funeral. The idea that she was murdered by—by—by an immigrant coming in and (inaudible) talk about that. But here’s the deal, there’s a lot of young women who are being raped by their—by their in-laws, by their—by their spouses, brothers and sisters, by—just—it’s just—it’s just ridiculous. And they can do nothing about it. And they try to arrest them when they cross state lines.
It's ridiculous, alright. And it's neither true nor false.
Say you were trying to understand Biden's border policies from his presentation at the debate. He gave you this.
We worked very hard to get a bipartisan agreement that not only changed all of that, it made sure that we are in a situation where you had no circumstance where they could come across the border with the number of border police there are now… It’s better than when he left office. And I’m going to continue to move until we get the total ban on the—the total initiative relative to what we’re going to do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers.
A typical Biden sentence runs like this: "And, number two, the idea—the idea that I have to apologize to you for anything along the lines." Nor did this just start up this year: I've been calling him a rattletrap for decades. It's a very precise word.
I’ll stop with the cruel quotations. Reviewing his own words must be like getting waterboarded, for Biden, and I feel sorry for the man. And that was an amazing debate, one that clarified the meaning of “truth” even as it abandoned the concept completely in all directions at once, or because it did. Truth is whatever those guys ain't.
My own preference as between someone who just emits clouds of puzzling nonsense all day and someone who can't open his mouth without lying, is for the nonsense. It's less evil. It's unintentional, perhaps. It's child-like (infantile) and hence innocent. If it were leading to surrealist poetry a la green ideas sleeping furiously, rather than to Biden-style flat-ass garble, I'd be even more enthusiastic. But nonsense isn’t necessarily straightforwardly malevolent, which may be the best we can hope for in the current environment.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell