He Died Like a Dog: How Trump Created A New American Dialect

Other generations had "to be or not to be." We have "many such cases."

If you spend any amount of time on Twitter, you’ve probably seen people using the term “many such cases.” Maybe you’ve even seen my weekly Twitter drama roundup, Many Such Takes. There’s also another Substack I recommend called, quite literally, Many Such Cases. This phrase has become a core part of my lexicon. Sometimes when I have nothing else to say after describing a phenomenon, I’ll just throw in, “Many such cases.” Because like…there literally are so many such cases.

It’s the perfect short-hand way to say that the thing you’re discussing happens a lot. Or sometimes you can just say it for no reason at all. It just sounds good. Many such cases!

Of course, most people know this started with Trump, but not everyone knows the specific origin of Many Such Cases.

And yet, when people say “many such cases,” they probably aren’t thinking about this specific tweet. They’re maybe thinking about Trump, or of nothing at all. It’s just become part of our language. In fact, as I was talking about this article with my mom, her reaction was, “Wait, many such cases came from Trump?”

Take, for example, all the various turns of phrase that Shakespeare coined, which might surprise you: breaking the ice, in a pickle, wild goose chase, the be-all and end-all. While I never thought I would compare Shakespeare, Western civilization’s most famous playwright, and Donald Trump, the guy who used the word “schlonged” to describe the downfalls of Hillary Clinton and Harvey Weinstein, or who said a hurricane was “one of the wettest we’ve seen from the standpoint of water,” I have to admit that Trump may be one of the most influential figures on the English language since Shakespeare.

Once you hear it, you can’t un-hear the bespoke dialect that Donald Trump seems to have created. I noticed his bizarre Trumpisms as far back as his feud with Rosie O’Donnell in 2006, when he repeatedly referred to her as a “loser” (Trump didn’t coin the word “loser,” but he uses it far more than most people do.) The word was interspersed in his improvised diatribes against Rosie, which he filmed in Trump Tower and released occasionally, like the old videos of Osama Bin Laden in his cave.

Trump’s use of the word “loser” is part of a larger phenomenon of simplistic insults, which go along with his trademarked taunting nicknames like “Lil Marco” and “Lyin’ Ted” (which he insists is spelled Lyen’ Ted.) Take, for example, his use of the words “nasty” or “terrible.” When he called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman,” it became a rallying cry for liberal pussy hat wearing women everywhere. But not long after, he referred to Ted Cruz (aka Lyen’ Ted) as a “nasty guy.” He later admonished CNN reporter Jim Acosta as a “rude, terrible person.” As recently as this year, he called General John Kelly a “terrible, stupid person.” There’s something kind of addictive about these simplistic insults. I know these are not nearly as ubiquitous as “many such cases,” but every now and then, when someone is driving me kind of crazy, I just think to myself, “What a nasty, terrible person.”

Another word Trump especially loves is “strong.” This came up frequently during his covid briefings, which I watched dutifully. At the beginning of the pandemic, he suggested using a flu vaccine as a fix, asking a round table of doctors, “Are you telling me a strong flu vaccine would have no effect on corona?” He continued to use the term “strong,” pretty often, almost as a filler word. “We are moving quite strongly on vaccine,” he might say. “We are moving quite strongly on cure.” One of the key points of the “moving quite strongly” turn of phrase is that it necessitates dropping the next word, almost like he was speaking in Russian. He wouldn’t say “We are moving quite strongly on a cure.” Just “We are moving quite strongly on cure.”